


Iron & Irony

by Veldeia



Category: House M.D., Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Crossover, F/M, Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, Sick Tony Stark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-06-21
Updated: 2008-06-21
Packaged: 2018-03-31 08:09:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 33,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3970423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Veldeia/pseuds/Veldeia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Tony Stark suspects he's caught a mystery illness, he turns to the best medical doctor he can find. But can House and his team solve this puzzle?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. "Can you get a cooler patient than this?"

Pepper Potts gazed anxiously at the sky. Tony had called an hour ago, he should here any minute now. The next minute, she scolded herself for being so anxious. There was hardly any reason for it. He'd only been gone for a week. He could manage a week without her. If he'd lose his passport or forget his social security number, he would call her - which he hadn't done, so everything must've gone well enough.

She understood perfectly why he hadn't taken her with him: though officially it had been a simple business trip to the Stark Industries office in São Paulo, his main reason for going to Brazil had been to check out SI's new biotech center in the Amazon. There'd been reports of some kind of trouble there, possibly Iron Man -sort of trouble. He was determined to keep her out of that kind of trouble, so he'd decided he'd go without her.

The fact that he was returning in the suit instead of his private jet suggested that he'd found such trouble. He had been very brief when he'd called, he'd just said that he's near and asked her to wait for him at the windows giving to the pool, which sounded silly, but, of course, she did as he'd asked.

There he was now, a small red and gold figure high up in the sky and approaching fast. Her worry doubled when she noticed he was flying unsteadily, swerving from one side to the other as if he wasn't completely in control or quite sure of the direction. Drunkenly. That was the best word to describe his flying. But he couldn't be - he did drink way too much, but he would never! She couldn't believe he would be irresponsible enough to wear the suit while under the influence.

As he got closer, she saw to her relief that the suit was perfectly intact. No bullet holes this time, nor scratch marks or burned spots or anything of the sort. But he still wasn't flying quite right, he was coming in pretty fast and where he was headed...

He covered the last feet so fast that she had just enough time to realize what was going to happen, and then there was a splash, as Tony Stark, alias Iron Man, landed quite ungracefully in his swimming pool.

She knew his suit had underwater capabilities, so she didn't panic quite yet, just stepped outside to be closer and waited. Sure enough, he climbed up from the pool and stood at the side for a while, unmoving, as if considering what to say. When he finally spoke, what he said took her by surprise.

"Miss Potts. Stay away from the pool. I want the whole thing decontaminated as thoroughly as possible. And don't come anywhere near me."

Pepper frowned, completely at a loss. Either he really was drunk, or this was some really weird joke, or, well, whatever else this might be, she knew she wasn't going to like it.

  


* * *

  


Dr. Lisa Cuddy marched through the lobby of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, moving as fast as she could while still keeping her dignity. She was worried that she'd been too slow and she'd be too late. She had to catch him before he left the building, because he might not answer his phone once he got home, and he absolutely had to take this case. It would be great for publicity, but only if they could handle it well enough, which meant solving the case, and he was the best man for the job. On the bright side of things, Cuddy didn't fear for one second that he wouldn't take it. He'd take the case with glee as soon as he saw what it was - if only she could catch him before he left.

He was just about to open the glass door leading outside.

"House! House, wait!"

Dr. Gregory House stopped, not even bothering to turn around to face her. "There's this really annoying buzzing in my ears..." he muttered, as if to himself, but loud enough for her to hear.

"House, I have a case for you."

"No you don't. I've done a good day's work. I spent the last two days on a difficult case, I solved it, I've even done some clinic duty, there is no excuse that you can use to keep me here."

"Oh yes, there is. You'll want this one. You'll regret it if you don't take it."

"No, I won't." His tone was still as unenthusiastic as before, but at least she'd piqued his interest enough that he actually let go of the door handle and turned around. "Nothing in the world can be more appealing to me than a cold beer and a 'Prescription Passion' marathon."

"I'd bet you a hundred bucks that this is, but you wouldn't pay me anyway so there's no point."

"You're just too afraid you'd lose. All right, I'll look, and then I'll go home and you can give this," he took the file from her, "to someone else who won't have to work overtime on it."

He skimmed the file, still no feelings registering on his face except for not-so-mild annoyance. "So, someone's even sloppier than me at writing these things. There's hardly anything here to work on, and none of that is even remotely interesting."

"You might want to read the name of the patient."

"I don't care what he's called," House answered instantly, then read it, and there, finally, she got the reaction she'd been waiting for. "Oh my God. You've got to be kidding."

"I wouldn't do that to you, now, would I?"

"Would you? You'd get high doing it! But no, you're not this creative. This has to be the real thing. So, where is he?"

  


* * *

  


Tony leaned his armored head against the back wall of the cleanroom. He was sitting on the floor, partly because he didn't feel nearly sick enough to be lying down, partly because lying down in the armor was pretty uncomfortable.

He was overreacting, that was all. This was nothing. He was overreacting, and he was going to be so embarrassed when they found out that this was just the flu. He'd get loads of negative publicity, and that'd affect his company, but he didn't mind that. The most important thing was not to put anyone else at risk, so he had to be a bit overcautious and neurotic.

He'd spent almost an entire day in Brazil in self-imposed quarantine, fitting his suit with high efficiency air filters, even though he hadn't even felt sick at the time. Now he was sitting in said suit in the hospital in pretty much complete isolation. If this was the worst case scenario and he really wasn't overreacting, he sure wasn't going to spread it any further, whatever "it" might be.

He'd been waiting for an hour or so when the airlock-like door finally opened and a figure in a protective suit stepped in. He was limping badly. Must be the man Tony had come to meet. He sat up a bit more upright.

"Dr. Gregory House, I presume?"

"Wow, the Invincible Iron Man actually knows me?"

"I know a lot of pretty nurses, and you've got a reputation." 

The truth was, of course, that he'd asked Pepper to find him the best diagnostician there was, and everything and everyone had pointed to Dr. House. The man had convincing credentials, although he allegedly also was a complete pain in the ass. Tony was starting to learn the truth of those allegations already.

"I do? Hm. Maybe I should take up superheroing too. I could call myself 'Superdoc'! Or maybe, if that's too obvious, how about 'the Cane'?"

"Yeah, really catchy and masculine. The girls would love that. I can just imagine what your superpowers would be like."

"Who says I haven't got such superpowers already? Of course, I couldn't compete with your legendary exploits, Mr. Stark. And you can take the suit off, everyone knows your secret identity by now, since you were kind enough to share it with the press."

"Not going to happen. I might be carrying something genetically engineered for biological warfare. It could be unusually contagious."

"The psych ward is upstairs. You're clearly suffering from severe paranoid delusions. There's no way you'll infect anyone while in here, suit or no suit, and no way we're going to be able to diagnose, let alone treat you through that thing. Call me when you've cleared your head," House declared and took a few awkward steps towards the door.

"I'm not going anywhere. I can send readings from my suit's scanners directly to your computers, you can start from there. Plus, the local authorities in Brazil are still investigating the biotech center that might be where I got this from, so they may come up with something sooner or later. Until we've got some kind of an idea of what this could be, the suit stays on."

"You really want to make things difficult, don't you? Fine. Mark my words, we are not going to have a solid diagnosis before you get out of that suit and we can examine you properly. Before that, we'll do what we can, but just because I love a challenging puzzle, and because you're Iron Man and it's incredibly cool to be diagnosing you. So," House made his way to the bed and sat on it. "Is there some marvelous superheroic story behind this mystery illness of yours?"

Tony really wasn't in the mood for House's wit, he felt dizzy and his back was killing him, probably from spending so much time in the suit. "There's a story, but it's not the least bit heroic, there's no supervillain, no action scenes and no sex."

"Boring," House sounded almost genuinely disappointed. "But let's hear it anyway."

"Long story short: I went to Brazil on a business trip, spent a few days doing business, and then went to check on my company's new biotech center. I'd heard there was something weird going on, and yeah, there really was. The head researcher was there to meet me, but the place seemed practically abandoned. He offered some half-credible explanation about a local holiday. He then gave me a tour of the facilities, which ended in a laboratory where he pulled a gun and redecorated the place with his brains. The next few days I spent cleaning up the mess and trying to figure it out. I only started feeling sick this morning when I was returning home."

"Well, that's not all that boring, though it sounds more like the X-Files than a superhero tale. Any particular reason you're so sure that you've caught a super-disease of some sort, except for the fact that you're a superhero?"

"No one was working on anything infectious at the biotech center, if that's what you're implying, but the guy's last words before blowing up his head were 'I'm sorry, Mr. Stark'. I thought it might mean something. But I'll make this clear: I'm not sure. I just don't want to take any risks."

"You've already made that clear, Mr. 'I don't want to take this suit off, I'll rather stay undiagnosed and die a martyr'. So, have you got any explanation for what was going on there?"

"None. I searched all the computers and came up with nothing, I contacted some of the researchers and they couldn't tell me anything useful, and the local equivalent of the CDC didn't find any unusual pathogens while I was there, but as I said, they're still working on it," Tony explained. 

That wasn't all of it, of course. He wouldn't tell all the details about the whole mess to some random doctor, since they couldn't possibly be medically relevant. Not to mention that he really didn't have any sort of a theory yet, he just had a lot of data to go through. He'd figure this out and catch whoever was responsible, but he wouldn't be able to do that before he was sure he wasn't a walking biological weapon.

"'No unusual pathogens'. Hmm. That sounds a lot like 'It didn't come from there!', so we might want to consider all other options. Brazil is a big place, we'll need to know all the places you visited, who you slept with, what you ate - and then, all the background: whether you've got any crazy relatives, evil twin brothers, et cetera, blah blah. I'll send someone to get a complete history with all the dull details I don't want to be bothered with." House got off the bed and limped out of the room.

Tony let the back of his helmet rest against the wall again. This was going to be a very long day.

  


* * *

  


"Symptoms so far include fever," House wrote on the whiteboard, "slight tachycardia and tachypnea which are most likely just situational, dizziness, headache, plus back pain and myalgias which are not surprising due to the fact that the patient has spent the best part of the last three days in a really cool iron suit."

House stopped for a while, studying his team. Nothing new or interesting there: Foreman looked skeptical, Taub mostly expressionless, Kutner excited and eager, and Thirteen was pretty.

House turned back to the whiteboard. "And let's add paranoia," he wrote below the rest. "The patient is in complete isolation but refuses to take off the suit because he's afraid he'll spread the disease anyway. That can't be healthy behavior."

Kutner couldn't contain his enthusiasm anymore, but chimed in, "We're really diagnosing Iron Man? Can you get a cooler patient than this?"

"Sorry to disappoint, Kutner, but I'm already convinced that no matter who he is, he's not going to be a very cool case. Differential diagnosis?"

"This could be anything!" Thirteen exclaimed. "The only symptoms that can't be explained away just like that are fever, dizziness and headache, and those could mean anything from the common cold to HIV."

"The common cold? But it cannot be!" House replied, though of course it was a very likely possibility. "The Iron Man can't have the common cold. At least it has to be the super-cold or maybe even the feared 'Titanium Cold'!"

"She's right and you know that, House," Foreman commented. "We'll need to check his blood for..."

House interrupted him. "Not possible as long as he refuses to take off the suit. This is all we're going to get. The good news is that we can get readings realtime from his suit's inbuilt scanners. The bad news is that all we've got is body temperature, respiratory rate, EKG and EEG, and whatever symptoms he can describe himself."

Foreman shook his head. "This is stupid. There's no way we can diagnose him based on nothing more than that."

"Oh really? I didn't know that!" House replied with his most ironic tone. "Of course we can't, and I already told him as much. I'm sure he'll take the suit off sooner or later, either when he stops feeling sick or when he gets too sick. We just need to wait. While we're waiting, humor me and come up with something that's more interesting than the common cold."

"He's been to Brazil, could be a tropical illness. Dengue fever?" Taub suggested.

"Realistic but not all that interesting."

"How about oropouche fever or chikungunya?" Thirteen tried.

"Good! Less common and with weirder names, so they're cooler. And both possible, too."

"Ebola?" Kutner put in.

"Let's not get too jazzy here. Last I checked, Brazil is not in Africa."

"No, but he was visiting a biotech center where they might've been working on infectious disease among other things, who knows what they've got there? And then there's the story about something weird going on there and a guy who apologized to Stark and then committed suicide?"

"Kutner, you're just humoring his paranoia. Though I'm sure he was lying his socks off when he told that Stark Industries has nothing whatsoever to do with biological warfare, I'd think he was telling the truth when he said that the local biohazard teams couldn't find anything like that at the complex. As to the story, all it means is that his company has some internal problems. I'm sure he hasn't told us even half of it and he's not going to, since it's medically irrelevant. So, let's just stick to the facts instead of fantasy."

"All these tropical disease are viral and there's no treatment anyway, so if it's one of them, waiting is still all we can do," Foreman pointed out.

"Yup. As I said, this is probably going to turn out a pretty dull case. The only reason Stark is here bothering us and not at home with the flu is that he's convinced he's the center of the world, and he's completely paranoid because of that. I'm going home. Let me know if something interesting happens."

After having seen Iron Man live, which admittedly had been pretty cool, House had gotten second thoughts about taking this case. Stark wasn't very interesting as a person, not much of a puzzle - he'd been on the news often enough that House was convinced he had the man completely figured out already. So far he had seen none of Stark's allegedly keen intellect, and he doubted there really was any. Stark's reported three month captivity in Afghanistan had probably been just a publicity stunt. Stark was an annoying egoistical jerk just like House himself, but unlike House, Stark had convinced everyone, maybe even himself, that he really was a superhero do-gooder on a quest to save the world, while all he really cared about were the glory and the girls.


	2. "You can't stay like this forever"

"You can't stay like this forever, Tony," Pepper told him, exasperated. She'd spent most of yesterday arranging the decontamination of Tony's swimming pool and its surroundings, and now she was standing in a full protective suit in his hospital room.

Tony had been here, in the hospital, in quarantine, in his suit, for almost a day now, and there'd been no change, no news, nothing. As annoying as House was, he had pretty much convinced Pepper that Tony wasn't seriously ill, just seriously overcautious.

"I'm still feverish," he replied, pointing at the computer display by his bedside. They'd set it up to show what little medical data they could get out of his suit. It showed his temperature was at 101.4. "I can stay like this until I'm no longer sick."

"You could just take the suit off, let them have some blood samples and whatever else they want, find out what the problem is, and then continue convalescing at home. If you're not seriously sick, it wouldn't change anything, and if you are, then hiding in the suit will just make things worse. I mean, can you even eat in that thing?"

"I'll survive a few days without eating, and everything else I've taken care of, I've got water in the suit, and, uh, waste-management. We've been through this twice already, Pepper, and I'm not about to change my mind. Besides, that nurse with big brown eyes is really pretty, and I'd hate to leave before I've gotten to know her better."

She shook her head, huffed indignantly and headed out of the room. Like every time she came here, she had to go through the meticulous process of getting off the protective clothing and decontaminating everything and herself. Leave it to Tony to make such a spectacle of being sick. If he'd just stayed at home, in bed, drinking tea and watching TV, like normal people did... Still, underneath the annoyance, there was still the tiniest hint of worry. He was right most of the time. What if he was right now, too, and everyone else was wrong? What if scolding him and trying to coax him out of the suit and the isolation were a huge mistake?

  


* * *

  


On his way to talk to Tony Stark, Kutner ran into the man's red-headed assistant, nearly knocking her over. She was really pretty, like all the girls Stark surrounded himself with, but right now, she looked cross.

"Please tell me you have some news," she said, sounding as irked as she looked.

"Sorry, no," he answered. "I'm just going to talk to him, in case he can come up with any details we don't know that might be useful."

"Good luck to you, then, I really wish you learn something. If he'd only listen to reason..."

"You don't think he's doing the right thing here, then?"

"What, and you do?"

"Well, I suppose he knows what he's doing, he's Iron Man, after all."

"Oh please!" she cried, and walked away, leaving Kutner staring after her, baffled - but wow, was she impressive, the way she walked with those heels!

Kutner gazed until she'd disappeared from sight, then returned to what he'd been about to do, getting into a protective suit and entering Stark's room. Boy, was it weird seeing Iron Man like this, in a drab, featureless room in all his gleaming red-and-gold glory. He was sitting on the bed, talking. Kutner frowned. There was no one else in the room, so who was Stark talking to?

"Yes, I've contacted Santos's next of kin, yes, all that's taken care of. No, I'm... sort of occupied at the moment, I won't be able to stop by anytime soon, I'm afraid. Maybe next week. I'll have Pepper schedule something when it's possible. Great. Let me know instantly if there's anything new."

Of course, Stark was on the phone! He had an inbuilt phone in his helmet. Wow. Kutner could guess he couldn't probably even imagine all the gizmos Stark must have in that suit. Of course he'd want to be able to answer his phone everywhere in the world. Cool.

Unwilling to disturb the billionaire-superhero, Kutner knocked on the wall to announce his presence. "Mr. Stark? If you're not too busy, I'd like to ask some questions."

"Sure. I was just talking to my representative in Brazil. They've still got nothing. What about you?"

"Well, we've got a lot of ideas, but we can't really know if any of them are close to the truth. How're you feeling? Still the same?"

"Pretty much, yeah. Definitely not better," he answered, and coughed a little, the sound coming through strange and metallic. "Oh, and this is new, I think."

Kutner wrote "cough" on the file on the clipboard he was carrying. Too bad it was yet another nonspecific symptom. "So, I thought I'd ask you a bit more about Brazil. That biotech center of yours, what sort of things are they researching there, exactly? They haven't publicized anything, as far as I could find out."

"They haven't, since they've only been in operation for a bit over a month. I already told House we don't do bio-warfare, they haven't got anthrax or smallpox in there. They do have some hazardous materials, but no infectious disease. The main projects have to do with nanotechnology, particularly ways to utilize it in medicine."

"Couldn't that be relevant to your situation?"

"I sure hope not, it's all pretty much theoretical so far, they have are no finished products and nothing that's even been tested on humans yet. Still - I'm starting to feel like a parrot here - they weren't working on making people sick. Not my company. I've killed enough people already."

"But you've saved many, too," Kutner remarked. "You're a superhero, after all."

"I think I've harmed more than I've helped," Iron Man bowed his armor-clad head. "People like you are the real heroes. The ones that get hardly any thanks and no attention, and save more lives."

Kutner was glad he wasn't the blushing type, because if he were, he'd surely have blushed at that. He was even more convinced now than before that House hadn't got the slightest idea about what Stark really was like. He really wasn't attention-seeking and self-centered, he was a true hero. "Thank you, Mr. Stark. And for what it's worth, I believe in you. I think you're right to be cautious. Don't mind House, he doesn't like anyone and he thinks all people are lying morons."

"I figured as much already, Doctor... what was your name?"

"Kutner."

"Thanks, Doctor Kutner. Glad to know there's at least one person here who doesn't think the old rustpot has gone off his rocker."

"I'm sure I'm not the only one. Anyway, where were we..." he muttered, glancing at his clipboard. "Right. I've got a few more questions."

  


* * *

  


Kutner seemed over-eager and naive, but Tony found talking to him a refreshing change. During the day he'd spent in this hospital, nearly all conversations had been either contests of wit (with House), clinical and impersonal (with House's subordinate Doctor Taub) or more or less aggressive disputes (with Pepper). It was nice to have a conversation where the other person didn't take him for an idiot, an object of study or a five year old.

The questions Kutner asked also helped Tony to shape the ideas and theories he'd been thinking over. After the young doctor left and Tony finally had some peace and quiet, he asked Jarvis to show him the data from the Amazon biotech center again.

He wasn't at his best, his thinking slowed by the fever, the dizziness and the nagging uncertainty of whether or not he was just on a mindless wild goose chase. Still, he'd been able to figure out things, and what he'd come up with was alarming.

Doctor Jose Santos, the late head researcher at Stark Industries biotech, was the man who had first contacted Tony about something weird going on. His first report had only mentioned some missing equipment, accompanied with computer glitches: someone had taken the stuff and removed any records of it, but Santos or someone under him had noticed the theft nevertheless. Later, Santos had sent a report concerning trouble with some of the personnel, who had lots of poorly explained absences from work on one hand, a lot of overtime at odd hours on the other.

Something had been going on, and Santos had known about it. And now Santos was dead - he was the man who had taken his life right in front of Tony's eyes. Why exactly, that was one thing Tony couldn't figure out. The most worrisome thing was, Santos' body had disappeared. Tony had had a very difficult time explaining it to the man's next of kin. It'd been taken right under his nose, because he had been at the biotech center all the time after the incident. He'd even talked to the guy whose job it had been to transport the body. This suggested that the enemy, whoever they were, had infiltrated the local authorities. If they had, then it was no surprise that the investigations there had lead to nothing. The bad guys had cleaned and covered their tracks.

There had also been another death, one that hadn't raised any suspicions at first. A younger scientist, a man by the name of Jonas Blakely, had died in a supposed accident on the river Amazon, two weeks ago. No one really knew what had happened, just that he'd gone canoeing and then his body had been found in the river. He had drowned, it had looked like a free time accident that had nothing to do with his work, but maybe, just maybe, he had found out something and someone had silenced him.

Or then Tony was just being paranoid and building theories on nothing. That was always a possibility. Still, the more he studied this, the more worried he grew.

He coughed a little. It didn't feel serious, but it'd probably been wise to mention it to Kutner anyway, because he hadn't had a cough before today. All in all, he thought he felt a bit worse, but then again, the longer he stayed in the suit, the worse he was bound to feel. He had designed it for sustained use, but this was pushing it. There were moments when he actually felt a bit claustrophobic in the thing, short of breath, as if there wasn't enough air inside the metal shell...

Ah, damn. He needed to stop feeling sorry for himself and concentrate on the company trouble.

He'd had Jarvis go through the personnel records for any worktime irregularities, and it was easy to point out two scientists who'd clearly been up to something. Tony tried to contact these people, but not surprisingly, he wasn't able to reach either of them, and no one who knew them had been in contact with them during the last few weeks or so. There were a few others who were suspicious, but less clear. One of them actually answered his call - and he learned that the guy was a single dad with a little baby girl, which was why he had some trouble with his timetables. So, a false lead.

Tony re-read the files on the two missing scientists. A woman and a man, possibly friends, since they had graduated the same year from the same school, though with different disciplines. The man was a microbiologist, the woman specialized in nanotechnology. They had been working on different projects at SI biotech, he on ways to utilize biological components in nanotechnology, she on self-replicating nanotech. Neither of the projects had had anything even nearly finished and functional, and especially the former had been mostly theoretical. Still, combining the two added up to... Yeah, he didn't even want to think about it. Self-replicating half-biological nanobots?

Of course, it was unlikely that just two, or even four people (counting the other suspects) could come up with such a breakthrough, so Tony set Jarvis to search for any other missing scientists with similar specializations.

Tony sincerely hoped he was wrong about this.

  


* * *

  


House had had a busy and active morning of avoiding work, and after a modest lunch break of about two hours, he sat down in his office to waste a few minutes thinking about Stark. After all, he was House's only active case at the moment.

Kutner had interviewed the patient earlier, and had learned of one new symptom: cough. That told as little as the earlier ones. The flu was still a likely diagnosis.

"And, I just thought I'd say... I don't think you're being fair to him. He's not a bad person. He's not here to annoy us, he's here because he wants to protect others," Kutner had also told House. He smirked at the memory. Kutner was blissfully oblivious to the fact that the world wasn't all good and sunny, and that superheroes were just people, just like the rest of them, maybe even a bit worse.

"He's here because he wants it to look like he's protecting others while he's really just protecting himself," House had answered. "But I know that understanding such complex motives is beyond you, so don't even try, it might fry the few neurons you've got left."

House opened Stark's file on the laptop, checking the current situation - still feverish, respiratory rate and pulse still on the fast side, but not notably so. EEG showed beta waves, suggesting that he was thinking actively. Probably hitting on some nurse.

House scrolled the data backwards, checking the readings some hours ago, during the night and yesterday. Gazing at them gave him the intuitive hunch that he'd missed something important here. He hadn't had anyone actively follow the readings, just someone glancing at them every now and then to see there was nothing alarming. That might've been a mistake - but he'd been certain that there wouldn't be anything.

He scrolled back to the readings on admission, and then onwards again, towards the current moment. There was a trend. The respiratory rate was clearly higher now than before. House had thought the tachypnea was due to the fever, but that didn't seem likely anymore, since the patient was breathing faster now than yesterday. Combine that with the cough, and it could suggest a pulmonary problem. It might suggest that House had been wrong to take things for granted. 

They really needed to get Stark out of that suit and start diagnosing him properly. House had spent enough time playing with Stark's insane rules. It was time to quit playing and get serious. He'd flood the room with an anesthetic to knock Iron Man unconscious and strip that suit off him, if that was what it took.

House picked up his cane and hobbled to Stark's room as fast as he could.

"All right, Stark. Your time is up. Get out of that suit, or I shall use my magical doctorly superpowers to get you out against your will."

"Ooo, I'm so frightened," Stark answered. The suit distorted his voice so much that House couldn't tell if he actually sounded out of breath. "To what do I owe the pleasure of you harassing me personally? I've already had Taub and 'Thirteen' tell me the same thing today."

"Obviously, they failed. I won't. You're sick, Stark. Think of all those cute little children and puppies who die and those bad guys who go free while you're stuck here, refusing to let us do our job," House told him in a mock accusing tone.

"So now you've noticed I'm sick? Well done, Doc! The fact that I'm in a hospital should've given you some clue about that."

"I could have you declared incapable of making decisions for yourself. I'm sure your secretary would back me up."

"No way she would!" Stark was starting to sound genuinely angry. "You leave her out of this."

"Oh, that struck a nerve. Do you treat all the girls you buy with such chivalry?"

Iron Man stood up, his menacing armored figure towering over House, but he didn't speak - instead, almost as soon as he'd gotten off the bed, he fell on his knees, and then toppled backwards and landed on the floor with a loud clank.

House glanced at the screen. Stark's vitals were stable but high, which wasn't a wonder since he'd been so ticked off. House knelt by Stark's side, took hold of his metal-covered shoulder, shook and yelled, "Hey! You still with me? Stark?" 

He got no answer, the patient seemed to be unconscious. House's best bet was that it was simply a combination of too little food and water, slight lack of oxygen and the change in blood pressure when Stark had stood up. There was no way to confirm that since the suit readings didn't include BP or O2 sat, but if he was right, Stark was likely to come to very soon. House hadn't got any time to waste.

This wasn't exactly what he had had in mind, but it worked just fine. He called for help and began scrutinizing Iron Man's suit to find out how to open it.


	3. "What is that thing?"

"Miss Potts? Hello, this is Jim Rhodes. I hope I'm not interrupting anything?"

"Not at all," Pepper answered the phone. She'd joined doctors Kutner and Hadley (who was, for some reason, called Thirteen) for a cup of coffee at the hospital cafeteria. Now, she stood up and walked away from the table to talk to Rhodes, leaving the doctors to compare their experiences about tropical disease. "Why did you call me, though, and not Mr. Stark?"

"I figured he wouldn't be able to answer, I guess I was wrong? I've no idea what's going on in there. I just heard it on the news, so all I know is he's in a hospital, in New Jersey, of all the places you could pick. Is Tony all right?"

"I wish I knew! Something happened when he was in Brazil, and now he's sick. We're here to consult one of the world's top diagnosticians, trying to figure out what's wrong. But, to tell you the truth, the doctor seems convinced that he's just caught cold."

"That's good to hear. I mean, I was getting worried here. Since there's been no official statement, the reporters are having a ball speculating what he's got. Half of them are betting on a new injury sustained as Iron Man, the other half on something old from the Afghanistan incident, and then there's one who's convinced that his liver's finally quit on him because of all that drinking..."

"Well, they're all wrong, that's for sure. We're postponing giving a statement until we've actually got something to state. So far we haven't got anything, and it's partially Mr. Stark's fault. The doctors haven't been able to examine him properly, since he's been wearing his suit several days on end, because he's afraid he'll spread whatever mysterious disease he might have... And I don't know whether to be with him on this or against him. I just wish this whole mess was over with already," Pepper explained. She felt like pouring it all out, all the stress, the uncertainty, the irritation, the worry. Rhodes was a good friend of Tony's and she'd come to consider him her friend as well. She could tell him everything and he'd understand, he knew how impossible Tony could be.

"Jeez, Tony sure knows how to beef up the drama. You know what, Miss Potts - I'll catch the first possible transportation and join you there."

"That'd be great! Maybe he'll listen to you. Um, wait a moment..."

The two young doctors had suddenly leaped up from their seats, looking at their pagers. As they noticed Pepper's inquiring gaze, Hadley spoke up, "Miss Potts? Mr. Stark's unconscious."

"What? Is he okay?" she tried to ask, but the doctors were already heading out of the room.

"Oh, Rhodey, there might be a problem with Tony, I've got to go. I'll call you later," she finished the conversation and hurried after the two doctors.

Doctor Taub met them at the decontamination room, and told Pepper to stop where she was. "You'd better stay here, you'd just stand in our way if you came with us. We'll let you know as soon as we have any news..."

"No, I'm coming with you," she said adamantly. "I'm the only one who knows anything about the Iron Man suit. You might need me."

They had to admit she was right, and as soon as they were in full protective clothing and inside Tony's room, they found out that her knowledge of the suit was exactly what was needed.

Tony was lying on the floor, and House was busy trying to get the suit off him. He'd managed to remove the helmet and the gauntlets, and now he was working on a sleeve. He didn't seem to be getting anywhere, though.

Tony's eyes were closed, and now that the helmet was off, Pepper saw he looked worse than she'd expected. His face was pale and haggard, and the stubble that surrounded his usually well-trimmed beard didn't help at all. The dark circles under his eyes suggested that he hadn't had a lot of sleep, and reminded her of how many timezones he'd crossed yesterday, his suit covering huge distances as fast as a fighter plane.

"Is he... Is he all right?" Pepper stammered.

"He's stable, he'll come around soon. Hey, you three, quit standing there and start helping me," House urged his team.

"Wait, you can't..." Pepper began.

"He's out cold, needs medical attention and I'm his doctor. Of course I can," House declared, though his last words were somewhat undermined by his lack of success in what he was doing.

In a way, Pepper agreed with House. She had wanted Tony out of the suit herself, hadn't she? She didn't agree with his methods, though. Taking advantage of Tony's unconsciousness - the reason for which she didn't even know - was mean, and she didn't want any part of it. If she helped House, Tony would feel like she'd betrayed him, and she didn't know how she'd be able to stand that.

Luckily, she never had to make the decision. Tony woke up before she got that far.

For a few seconds, there was an adorably confused expression on his face, such a lost boy look that it'd have melted any girl's heart. The next moment, his eyes widened as he took in where he was and what had happened, and then narrowed with cold fury.

"House!" he growled with such authority that Pepper thought he sounded like Iron Man even though he no longer wore the helmet. "Are you out of your mind? You don't want to fight me. I'm way out of your league." As he spoke, Pepper realized that though he sounded menacing enough, he was speaking in short phrases, as if he was winded.

"Depends on which weapons we choose to use in this duel," House replied, seemingly carefree. "Feel free to sue me, I had solid medical grounds for getting you out of the suit. If you want to fight superhero-style, you'll need to get me a suit of my own or it'll be unfair."

"Solid medical grounds, like hell. It's your fault I fainted in the first place. Must've been a real testosterone rush, having decked Iron Man just like that."

Pepper was shocked. House had deliberately caused this? How dared he! She studied the doctor's face to figure out if what Tony said was true, but House was unreadable.

Thirteen had the sense to cut the pointless arguing short. "Mr. Stark, Doctor House, this is getting us nowhere. And Mr. Stark, it's a fact that your suit's already been opened, so whatever decontaminating effect it had is now compromised. If you carry something contagious that's airborne, then it's probably already in the air here. You could just as well give in."

Tony glared at House for a while longer, a dark look that, if looks could kill, would've been a nuclear bomb. House stared back, his icy blue eyes challenging, unyielding.

Finally, Tony closed his eyes. The room was silent for a while except for the sound of his heavy breathing.

"Fine. You're right," he relented, looking at Thirteen now. He could admit she was right. Pepper guessed he would never admit that House might've been right, too.

  


* * *

  


Taub had to admit that without Stark and his assistant helping them, they might never have managed to get him out of the Iron Man suit. It was much more than just simple armor, which shouldn't have come to him as a surprise, since Stark had actually been able to spend several days wearing it continuously.

The last remaining pieces were the chest and back plates. Pepper Potts showed Thirteen how to open the locking mechanisms in the sides. House, Taub and Kutner stood by and watched as the women worked.

"Good thing this version's a bit easier to take off than the previous ones," Pepper noted to Stark.

"Oh? I was thinking the opposite," Stark answered, still sulking. "It comes off too easily. I might need safeguards. I don't want any actually dangerous enemies undressing me while I'm unconscious," he put a slight weight on the words "actually dangerous", just enough that House would notice the barb. Stark really was smooth. He was one of the few people Taub had met so far who'd been able to challenge House's sneering.

Thirteen and Pepper lifted the chestplate off Stark. Taub was taken by surprise again as he saw that the light that had been gleaming brightly in the armor's chest was not attached to the suit, but directly to Stark's body.

House moved closer to Stark. "What's this, the latest craze in body modifications? When tattoos and piercings just aren't extreme enough?" he jeered, reaching to pull the thing off.

"No!" Pepper exclaimed.

Stark placed his hand protectively over the glowing blue and silver disk. "Remove it, and you won't have a patient left to diagnose," he said. There wasn't even a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

"You agreed we could take the suit off, and it shouldn't be hard to understand that having a chunk of metal on your chest is going to obstruct our work," House said, quite serious as well.

"Didn't you hear what I said? Removing it would kill me," Stark said, speaking slowly, as if to a child. "It's not on my chest, it's in my chest, and it's not an ornament." He grabbed the device with his hand, twisted it and pulled it out. Pepper cried out softly, looking horrified.

Taub stared at Stark, amazed. There was actually a deep, metal-lined hole in his chest, where the device was set. As a plastic surgeon, Taub had seen all kinds of strange things that people wanted to do to themselves, but this was too far out to be anything like that. He couldn't imagine anyone would voluntarily choose to have a gaping hole in their upper body. Taub considered how this would affect their work: they wouldn't be able to get an echocardiogram through that thing, it would stand out disturbingly in X-rays, MRI would be out of the question... Even without the suit, Stark would still be a very challenging patient.

Stark seemed to be holding his breath as he held the device, and after mere seconds had passed, he screwed it back in its place and shuddered. "I hope I've made my point. I don't want to do that again."

"What is that thing?" Kutner asked, clearly captivated by Stark.

"It's a miniaturized arc reactor. Built it myself. I was hit by a bomb of my own design in Afghanistan. The shrapnel is still in my chest. This device," he tapped it with his fingers, "keeps it from making my heart as holey as Swiss cheese."

"But that makes no sense," Taub had to speak up. "There are better ways to manage an injury like that. Why resort to something this invasive and crude? It can't be completely inoperable, why not simply have surgery?"

"Invasive and crude - that's the way you do things, if caught in a cave, captured by terrorists."

"What's to stop you from having surgery now, though?" Thirteen suggested.

Stark frowned, thoughtful, his expression somewhat difficult to read. Pepper was looking at him with raised eyebrows. 

After a while, he shook his head. "I didn't come here to have heart surgery. I came to have a disease diagnosed. Would you people mind actually doing your job?"

  


* * *

  


Of course, Tony had considered surgery. He knew that what even the miracle-working Ho Yinsen had not been able to do, in a bleak cave with haphazard instruments, would be possible for a well-prepared surgical team in a modern hospital. Still, the idea made him uneasy. 

The way Pepper looked at him, he could see she was all for it. She would love knowing that his life didn't depend on the arc reactor, that he couldn't be killed by someone simply removing the device, like Stane had nearly done.

He didn't enjoy being dependent, either, but it wasn't as simple as that. Of course, getting rid of the shrapnel wouldn't have to mean getting rid of the arc reactor. It would probably be easier to leave it in its place instead of going through complex reconstructive surgery to get rid of the hole in his chest. It wouldn't be the same, though. He had grown oddly attached not just to the device, but to the injury as well. It was a thing that defined him, like a dozen other negative character traits that most other people didn't appreciate, but he was proud of, in some twisted way. It was a constant reminder of the fact that he shouldn't even be alive, that he had survived for a reason. It was a symbol of how he had changed and what he had become.

Somewhere deep down, he was afraid that if his body were returned to the health it'd had before Afghanistan, he'd revert to the person he had been, back then. Just as intelligent as now, but without a conscience, shallow, directionless.

It was a dilemma he didn't want to face right now, so he simply brushed the matter aside and told the doctors to concentrate on the immediate problem.

Tony needed to get off the floor and on the bed, so he stood up, and almost fell down again as his vision started to gray out. Instantly, there were several pairs of hands stopping his fall, helping him sit down on the bed and then lie down.

Ironically enough, despite of what he'd told House earlier, it was only now that Tony truly realized how sick he was. The suit had obscured some of it. Without its strength-enhancing effects, moving was a huge strain, and what he had taken for threatening panic was actually real trouble catching his breath. It was obvious it hadn't been this bad before, though - if it had, Jarvis would've mentioned it.

Tony also felt naked, even before House's team started cutting off his undersuit. It was easy to appear fearless and confident in the Iron Man armor. Without it, he felt weak, fragile and insecure.

The doctors went on with their work, attaching medical monitoring equipment - the display that had showed the suit data was only showing an error message now that he wasn't in the suit anymore. As soon as they'd checked his blood oxygen level, they fitted him with a nasal cannula for extra oxygen, and they told him that his blood pressure was pretty low so they'd give him medication for that. Most of the time, though, they were pretty much ignoring him, treating him like a lab specimen. He didn't mind. Pepper had slipped out of the room at some point, and he appreciated her giving him the privacy. He was incredibly tired. For the first time during his illness, Tony relaxed and gave in to the feverish haze that'd been threatening to take him over for days.

  


* * *

  


"And as Stark Industries stock continues to fall, the question on everyone's lips is, 'Where is Iron Man'?" the news reporter read. The image shifted to a magnificently shot sequence of Iron Man flying in the cerulean sky over a calm, deep blue sea.

House sighed. No matter what his opinion of Stark was, he couldn't help liking Iron Man. The armor was the single coolest thing invented since monster trucks first saw daylight. House also liked the symbolic value of the suited superhero, because he enjoyed observing the effects it had on people. Some hero-worshipped it without reservation, some hated it right away. House himself remained neutral. After all, Iron Man was just a piece of fiction, a legend with only loose ties to reality. House liked him like he enjoyed his favorite soap opera.

"The self-made superhero, also known as billionaire industrialist Tony Stark, was last seen yesterday, entering Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey in full armor, as confirmed by several eyewitnesses." The screen now showed the familiar facade of the building where House was at the very moment. "After that, he hasn't been seen or heard of. It is generally assumed that it is Mr. Stark himself who is ill, not a friend or a family member. However, there has been no official statement on his current condition."

Tomorrow morning, you shall have one, House thought to himself. The news broadcast moved on to other subjects, and House turned off the TV. It was past 6 PM, and he was still waiting for his team to return with the results. Luckily, he had no objections to working overtime now that the case actually had turned out interesting.

He had been wrong about the diagnosis. He was also starting to consider that he might've been wrong about Stark. The revelation that Stark had actually been captured and injured in Afghanistan had taken House by surprise, and he hadn't expected the grim, serious side of the man's personality that emerged at times. 

House wasn't sure he had figured out the relationship between Stark and his secretary, either. He had been certain that the girl was with Stark because he was handsome and had a lot of money, and he with her for almost the same reasons, because she was pretty and he could pay her enough. Their protectiveness over each other clearly contradicted that theory. Had they got a real relationship of some sort, or were they just good friends? And if they hadn't got a relationship, why not?

It was obvious House hadn't figured out Stark yet, which made him a puzzle, which was an added bonus to the case.

His three ducklings entered the room, each bringing a set of results. House spent some time reading and thinking them through, set the chest x-ray on the wall and limped to the whiteboard.

"We now have a diagnosis," he declared. "Give your best shot, the looser makes coffee."

Taub had been the one to do the chest x-ray, and he spoke up first. "Congestive heart failure."

House glanced at the x-ray. With the round silhouette of the arc reactor covering the heart, it was hard to say anything about it. The shrapnel wasn't visible, either. Without that thing blocking the view, an echocardiogram would've been very useful - now, they hadn't even bothered with trying to get one, since it'd show nothing. Nevertheless, they had enough clues. House didn't suspect for one moment that they were dealing with a heart condition here.

"Bzzzzt! That does it, Taub, you're our barista for tonight. Did you even look at the rest of the results? Or the ones we had before? No EKG abnormalities except for sinus tachycardia, and what about the several days' prodrome with non-specific symptoms?"

Taub crossed his arms and grimaced, saying nothing. It was a possible diagnosis, House gave him that, but not a very fitting one, and House expected better of him. Taub must be getting tired.

"Some viral infection that's hit his lungs," Kutner offered.

"That doesn't count, you need to be more specific."

"Pneumonia. Legionnaire's?" he tried.

"Now you're just guessing. Might be, but I'm going for something rarer. Thirteen, your turn. Don't worry, unless you'll suggest lupus, you're safe from coffee duty."

"There's no reason it has to be viral," she stated. "Could be tularemia."

"Stark would love that, it's a known biological weapon. You'll get extra points for it, and a hint. Take a good close look at the platelet count and white blood cells, and guess again."

"Thrombocytopenia, leukocytosis with neutrophilia and a left shift, plus circulating immunoblasts," she recited, studying the paper, then looked up and frowned. "I see what you're thinking, but I can't see how it fits, the incubation period is much too short."

"Come on, you don't need to suck up to Stark, he's not in the room. No one here's saying that the incident in Brazil has to be when he was infected. No, he must've caught this earlier."

"What's 'this' anyway?" Kutner asked.

"Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome," Thirteen answered, winning the diagnosis quiz.

Kutner looked stricken, and House knew it wasn't because he'd lost to Thirteen. It was because HPS wasn't the nicest diagnosis they could've hoped for.


	4. "I could use a second opinion here"

"Hantavirus? I've heard of it - but it's carried by rodents, right?" Tony looked up at the four doctors, dubious. Pepper saw and heard that, despite the extra oxygen, he still had trouble breathing normally.

"Yes. And it takes several weeks before the symptoms show up, which means you must've contacted it before you left to Brazil," Thirteen clarified.

"Makes no sense," he answered.

"I seriously doubt Mr. Stark has had anything to do with rodents," Pepper told them, as surprised by the diagnosis as he was, and figuring he'd rather not exert himself with a long-winded explanation. "There is absolutely no way there can be any pests at his home," she declared, since Jarvis would notice any right away and then they'd be doomed, "and the places where he spends time tend to be on the cleaner side. If he does go to some dodgier settings as Iron Man, the suit should protect him, right?"

"Something was going on in Brazil," Tony added, as if he hadn't been listening to her at all. He obviously had his mind set on it. She wondered if there was something he hadn't told her, some extra reason why he was so sure about it.

"Whatever was going on in Brazil, I don't give a rat's ass about it," House threw in a bad pun. "The symptoms match the disease. You asked us to do our job, and we're doing it. Would you mind playing your part, being a good patient and listening to your doctors?"

Pepper didn't think she could stand listening to yet another verbal duel between House and Tony, so she spoke up before Tony had the time to answer. "So, what's the prognosis, and how do you treat this?"

Even through the protective suits they wore, Pepper saw the three younger doctors exchange glances. House was the one to answer, though. "There's good news and bad news. Good news is, survivors of HPS come through with no lasting effects. The bad news is that there's no specific treatment, and the mortality rate is close to 40 percent. The disease has already progressed to the cardiopulmonary phase, and in lethal cases of the disease, death usually occurs within 24 hours from that."

"Oh no!" she uttered, and without her even realizing it, her gloved hand found its way to Tony's.

He squeezed her hand reassuringly. "I've fought worse odds," he told her. Funny, she thought, how the one who was sick was consoling the one who wasn't, and not the other way around. "So, what's going to happen next?" he asked the doctors.

"This is going to get worse," Thirteen answered this one, her voice controlled and emotionless, professional. "Breathing will become progressively more difficult, as your lungs fill with fluid. It's very likely that at some point we'll need to intubate and ventilate mechanically. The cause of death in terminal cases is that the heart starts to fail, eventually leading to a fatal arrhythmia."

"And what're we going to do? Just wait and see whether I'm going to kick the bucket?"

"There's no cure per se, no medication, but like she already mentioned, there's supportive care. We can keep you breathing if you can't breathe on your own, for starters. We treat the symptoms as best we can," Kutner explained.

"Oh, and on a side note, since there's only one person-to-person transmitted case of HPS ever, I think we can safely tone down the isolation a bit," Taub added, talking to the other doctors as well as to Tony and Pepper. "Should make things easier and more comfortable for everyone."

"Are you completely certain about this diagnosis?" Tony asked gravely.

"Not hundred percent, yet," Kutner said. "We haven't tested it, so we'll take some blood now and get confirmation as soon as possible."

"As long as you're not sure, we'll stick to the isolation. And while you're testing... Put some of my blood under a microscope. See if there's anything strange," Tony suggested. Pepper had no idea what he was thinking about.

House let out an exaggeratedly exasperated sigh. "Oh, puh-lease, Mr. Stark. The game's over, it's time to admit you're wrong and I'm right."

"I don't care who's right or wrong. I just want to know the truth," Tony replied solemnly. He pointed the rest of his words at House's team instead of the man himself. "Just do it, all right?" he pleaded, and coughed. "Consider it a last wish - if that makes it less offensive, taking orders from me."

None of the three answered anything to that, but Kutner moved in to draw the blood. House left the room before the others, and they followed soon after him, leaving Pepper alone with Tony.

"Colonel Rhodes is on his way here," she told him absently, still so shocked that she was unable to think of much of anything to say. "He should arrive in a few hours."

"Rhodey. Great," Tony actually smiled a little. As usual, he could find something to say. "Pepper, it's all right. After all I've been through... I'm not gonna be killed by a mouse."

"Of course you aren't," she replied automatically, but he looked so pale and so weary and so ill that she felt sick with worry nevertheless.

  


* * *

  


Forty percent mortality - a sixty percent chance to survive. Tony wondered what would be the possibility of surviving a load of shrapnel to the chest when captured by terrorists. Had to be pretty close to zero, and he'd made it. If the doctors were right and this really was hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, this should be a walk in the park compared to Afghanistan. If this was a regular disease, even a potentially deadly one, he was actually relieved. That was one very big if.

Before Pepper left to meet Rhodey in the lobby, Tony asked her to get him his helmet from the corner of the room where the suit was stacked. He didn't feel up to working anymore. How could he think when he could hardly even breathe? It felt like someone was pressing a pillow on his face. Nevertheless, he needed to try.

"Jarvis?"

"Online, sir. I have been monitoring your readings on the hospital computers, and I'd like to note that in your current condition, any unnecessary exertion should be avoided."

"This is necessary. I need to know about the missing scientists."

"I have completed the task, and I have results. In addition to the two Stark Industries employees, there are five other missing people in similar fields. Two nanotechnology-specialists, a microbiologist, a geneticist and a virologist. There was also a major technology theft reported at Nanogentec inc. in Dallas."

Tony shivered, and not just from fever-induced chills. Whether it had anything to do with his sickness or not, there was something big going on, there was no question about it. He had to do something - or rather, since he wasn't up to it, someone else had to.

"Collect all data relevant to this case and send it to James Rhodes."

"Will do, sir. I'll send him an email with instructions on where and how to access the data. May I suggest rest now, sir?"

"A fine idea, Jarvis," he found himself agreeing with his AI butler, this once.

He took off the helmet and let it clatter to the floor, because he hadn't got the strength to actually set it down. He tried to compare this to Afghanistan. Had he felt this weak? He didn't think so, not even when he'd just woken up with a car battery attached to his chest. 

He closed his eyes and tried to empty his mind, to fall asleep, but he soon found out he couldn't. He couldn't stop thinking about the mystery disappearances. How it ominously seemed that someone had been gathering a team to build something very nasty.

The door hissed open, letting a solitary figure into the room. From his size and his way of walking, Tony recognized him instantly.

"Rhodey. Good to see you."

"Tony! Pepper already told me about the diagnosis they gave you. How are you?"

"Been better," he answered. Articulating sentences of more than five words at a time was starting to feel impossible. "Look, Rhodey. There's something I need..." he needed to stop to breathe. This was so not good. "...you to do."

"Anything I can do, just name it."

"I just sent you e-mail with access..." - air, damn it, he needed more air - "...to certain files. Possibly related to this. Definitely related to something big. Jarvis will help you. You might want to hand it..." breathe in, then go on, "...over to S.H.I.E.L.D. This is their sort of stuff."

He was panting now, unable to catch his breath anymore. He could almost concretely feel Rhodey's worried, pitying gaze on him.

"Man, Tony, your lips are turning blue," Rhodey said, sounding seriously freaked out.

Either Rhodey pressed the call button or then an alarm had gone off somewhere, but instantaneously Kutner and a nurse rushed into the room and offered Tony an oxygen mask. It helped, he could breathe properly again. Whew.

According to what the doctors had said, this was going to get even worse. He looked up to Rhodey's concerned eyes and knew that Rhodey would see he felt scared, but he didn't mind, there was no need to keep up a facade around him.

He took the mask off to speak. "You gonna do what I asked, Rhodey?"

"Of course, sure I will. You just concentrate on getting better. I'll handle the investigation, whatever it's about."

  


* * *

  


Thirteen stared at the test results. "House was wrong. It's not HPS."

"It's not?" Kutner asked dumbly.

"Test came through negative," she said, and moved aside to let him see for himself.

"The results from the CDC won't arrive until sometime tomorrow. This might be a mistake, we need to re-check," Taub told them, as if they didn't know it already. It would be what House would tell them to do when they'd let him know. He'd ask them to re-check, and then check again, at least twice, before he'd believe they hadn't botched it.

"Don't you think we should do what Stark asked, too, though?" Kutner suggested.

Thirteen nodded. It wouldn't be a very difficult task, after all. "I'll do it and leave this to you in case I messed up something the first time."

Carefully following safety protocols while handling the possibly contagious blood sample, Thirteen made a smear and put the slide under the microscope. At a glance, she saw nothing she wouldn't have expected based on their earlier test results. Of course, hantavirus was much too small to show up with a regular optical microscope. Still, Stark hadn't asked her to look for that, but for "anything strange". She increased the magnification. 

After staring at the familiar blood cells for quite a while, she noticed something small that she couldn't recognize or explain right away. She zoomed even closer, nearing the limits of the microscope's resolution.

She had no idea what she was looking at. It was large for a virus, small for a bacterium, and there was something disturbing about it that she couldn't quite put a finger on. Now aware of what she was searching for, she scanned the rest of the smear closely, and found more of the strange organisms, or whatever they were. She got a picture of the thing, to examine it better on a computer screen.

"I could use a second opinion here," she called out to the others.

Kutner and Taub gaped at the thing, as mystified as she was.

"Never seen anything like it. Stark's full of mysteries, isn't he?" Taub said. "First the chest device, now this. What do you suppose it is?"

"Well, if he tests negative for HPS, but has this in his blood, maybe this is the pathogen we're searching for?" she suggested. It was really weird, but also logical. She glanced at Kutner, waiting to hear what he thought.

Kutner's expression was almost uncharacteristically thoughtful and anxious. "He knew it might be there, since he told us to look for it. But it couldn't be..." he said.

"Why not? I mean, it's strange, but doesn't it support Stark's Brazil theory, which you've been voting for all the time?"

"Yeah, sorry, that's not what I meant," Kutner hesitated, peering at the organism so closely that his nose almost touched the screen. "I meant that it couldn't be what I think it is. I mean, I think I know what this is, but it's a really scary idea."

"A biological weapon?" Taub offered.

"Not just that," Kutner turned to look at the others. "It's artificial. Stark told me himself that the biotech center in Brazil specialized in nanotechnology."

"So, who's going to break the news to House?" Taub asked.

  


* * *

  


House massaged his temples thoughtfully. This wasn't what he'd expected, and he was at a loss, maybe more so than ever before during his long and colorful career. They'd just jumped from the realm of medicine and science fact into science fiction and technology. Something Stark was far more familiar with than he was. He looked at the image, and on an intuitive level, he could instantly see that there was something unnatural about this tiny bug. House was glad he had let Stark stay in isolation as he had wished, instead of forcing him out of it. They definitely wouldn't want this thing to spread.

"We'll need to let Stark know," he told his ducklings.

"But it's past midnight, and he's getting worse, he should be resting," Kutner blurted out.

"And you think he's going to start getting better if we just wait?" House sneered, and got up. Better get this over with sooner than later.

Once in Stark's room, House glanced at the monitors. They had switched the nasal cannula to an oxygen mask, and so far Stark was managing, but House was prepared to bet it wouldn't last long. A fast decline after the onset of cardiopulmonary symptoms was a hallmark of HPS... He had to stop and remind himself that this was probably not HPS at all, merely something that progressed a lot like it.

House was surprised to learn that despite the late hour, Stark wasn't sleeping. He lifted the mask off his face and asked, "What's up, doc?"

"Please tell me you've injected yourself with the latest experimental nanotechnological creation to give you more superpowers," House suggested hopefully.

"Would I be here if I had?" The look on Stark's face was clear enough: he had instantly understood what House was talking about, he was taken aback, scared, but not really surprised.

"But you know what this thing in your bloodstream is, then?"

"I've an idea," he replied briefly. "It came from Brazil."

"Care to elaborate? It's, what? A nanotechnological virus? Based on how closely the symptoms resemble HPS, is there some connection to the real hantavirus?"

"I'd guess not entirely nanotech, partly biological," Stark answered, which made perfect sense to House. "Might use the real virus in its design. Can't know for sure."

"If this really came from Brazil, then the incubation period is much shorter than that of the real hantavirus. I'd guess this is more contagious too, and I'm afraid it could be more aggressive and have an even higher mortality rate than the original."

Stark simply nodded, his eyes showing that this once, he agreed with House in everything.

"I've never met anything like this. I didn't think stuff like this was even possible. I can't begin to explain how it works, if it's partly technological - like, how it can replicate. And I've no idea how to treat this. I guess we've got no choice but to keep the course we've already talked about, just give you all the supportive care we can and hope that it's possible to survive this thing," House spoke, sort of thinking out loud.

He never felt anything for patients, they were just puzzles, just nameless people - but this patient was the exact opposite of nameless. House had an awful sinking feeling, and he felt surreal. He felt like he was giving Iron Man a death sentence. 

"For HPS, there's at least a lot of data on how cases have been managed before, there've been trials for medication, all kinds of things. This is something I guess no one's ever faced before. So if there's anything more you can tell, Stark, now'd be a good time."

"I've got people working on it," Stark answered. "I don't know anything useful yet."

"But isn't this basically what you do?" House tried to push him, turning the sarcasm in his voice to the max. He'd come up with an idea, or rather, an idea of an idea he hoped Stark might come up with. Anything they could do to stop this thing or to slow it down would give Stark more chance of surviving it. "You're supposed to be one of the greatest technological minds of our age, isn't this right up your alley?"

"It's part biological, you forget that already?"

"No, but you should. If we could somehow attack the technological parts of this bug..."

Stark frowned. House could almost see his mind working furiously. "I don't know the design. It's not from Stark biotech, so..."

"It's probably somehow related to Stark biotech, right? Why's that important?"

"All our nanotechnology was supposed to have a failsafe," Stark replied, speaking quickly and then taking a few breaths from the oxygen mask. "A way to shut it down if things went bad. But it was all theoretical."

"What sort of a failsafe?"

"An EMP should kill it."

"An electromagnetic pulse? It messes up technology, so I guess that makes sense... We can't know what exact effects it would have on this, can we?"

"Most likely none. It's still worth a shot, though. How'd you guess..."

"That there'd be something like this? I didn't, I just anticipated that if you're half as smart as they say you are, you'd figure out something. So, how do we get an EMP without detonating a nuclear bomb, and so that it doesn't cause a blackout in the entire hospital and half the city?"

"No problem. Just get me a pen and paper, and my helmet and one of the gauntlets."

House eyed Stark with newly found respect. Seemed like the man really might be up to his reputation as a technological genius, after all.


	5. "I'm on a tight schedule"

Iron Man was standing near to the rim of the swimming pool, the turquoise water still behind him, the sunlight reflected from his red and gold armor so that it was almost blinding. But something wasn't right, Pepper knew it right away.

From some crack in the floor, from behind a pool-side chair, from numerous little hiding-places here and there, mouses emerged. Tiny, harmless creatures, fuzzy with black, brown and even white fur, sort of cute on their own, but there were so many, and they were all heading towards Iron Man, like swarming locusts. He fought uselessly, kicking around, waving his hands, as they climbed his armor, gnawing at it, stopping at the locking mechanisms, and as absurd as it was, they were opening it, eating their way through it.

One by one, pieces of his armor fell off and clattered to the floor, some of them splashing to the pool. Soon, it was all gone, and Tony stood there, in his dark undersuit, which was already torn by minute but sharp rodent teeth. And more and more mice kept appearing, seemingly out of nowhere, covering him so that she couldn't even see his face, just his eyes, wide with horror.

As frightened as she was herself, she stepped closer, reached for him, but there was nothing she could do. The weight of what had to be hundreds of mice was pushing him backwards, he stumbled, stepped over the rim and fell to the pool, the animals still hanging on to him, gathered on him, pushing him all the way to the bottom, and though he was struggling, she saw it was in vain, he was going to drown...

"Miss Potts!"

Bewildered and shaky, Pepper woke up to meet the empathetic dark eyes of Doctor Kutner. She was lying on a couch in a hospital hallway, wrapped in the blanket Rhodes had snatched for her, her shoes on the floor. She'd thought she'd rest a little, since it had been a long and difficult day. She hadn't been planning on falling asleep - and what horrible dreams she had had!

She blinked, trying to clear the sleep out of her eyes. "What time is it?"

"Quarter past one in the morning," Kutner answered. "I'm sorry I woke you up, but we've found out something and I thought you'd want to know."

"No need to apologize. Is Tony... I mean, Mr. Stark..." the dream was still playing itself over and over in her head, the vision of Tony pushed to the pool by the huge mass of tiny mice, drowning...

"He's holding on. It's the diagnosis that has changed."

"It's not the hantavirus thing after all?"

"Looks like it isn't. House is talking to Mr. Stark now. We don't know anything for sure anymore. It looks like the cause of his illness is an artificial, nanotechnological thing."

"Oh!" Pepper exclaimed, placing a hand over her mouth. She knew that nanotech had been the main field of research in the Brazil biotech complex, but she hadn't thought... He had known! She remembered how Tony had acted about this whole thing, and it was obvious he had suspected something like this all along. Why hadn't he told her?

He had told Rhodes, she guessed. Before she'd gone to sleep, Rhodes had stopped by after talking to Tony and told her that Tony had given him a task of some sort. He hadn't explained it more than that, had said that he didn't know himself what it was about, exactly, but that it had seemed important. He'd been heading out of the hospital to concentrate on the investigation, and had suggested to Pepper that maybe she should leave too, get a good night's sleep at a hotel and return first thing in the morning. She had disagreed, she had wanted to stay near to Tony, since he could take a sudden turn to the worse any moment.

"You know anything about this?" Kutner asked, dragging her back to the present.

"I don't, but I'm sure Tony does," she replied, feeling more than a bit vexed. Deciding not to care about the fact that she probably looked completely disheveled, her hair a mess, her clothes creased, she tossed aside the blanket, straightened her shirt and skirt, put on her shoes and headed towards Tony's room, Kutner following right at her heels.

Tony and House seemed to be in the middle of something, but she didn't care. "If you knew, if you had any idea about this, why didn't you tell me?" she shouted. "And you told Rhodes and sent him to investigate this stuff and you left me out! Did you think I couldn't handle it? You think I'm just some... Some damsel in distress who needs to be protected?"

House stood aside, making room for her at Tony's bedside. Tony had the bed raised in a seated position, and oddly enough, he was wearing his Iron Man helmet, the faceplate open since he also had an oxygen mask covering half his face. One red gauntlet rested on his lap. He had been scribbling something on a piece of paper when she'd stormed in, and now he'd stopped writing, staring at her, dumbfounded.

He lifted the mask aside to speak, but all he managed was "Pepper, I..."

"I know you just wanted what's best for me, but don't you think it's sometimes better to tell the hard, scary facts earlier, so that I've got some time to wrap my mind around them?"

It wasn't the way he looked, nor the way he was surrounded with medical machinery, IV's and wires and what not all around, that made her think he seemed even worse now, more ill than before. It was the way he seemed to be slow on the uptake, the way he failed to instantly come up with witty answers.

"I did want to protect you. And I didn't want to send you away," he finally admitted. "After all, what would they," he waved a hand at Kutner and House, "think if I didn't have any girls around?" he added, in a half-hearted attempt at his usual banter.

"And what's going on now?" she asked, her anger ebbing gradually. He'd hear about this later, she'd see to that. As soon as he was better.

"I'm working on a cure."

"You're the doctor now? And House is letting you? What's happened to you two?" she was baffled.

"This is a technological problem, he's the technological genius," House answered, sounding only slightly sarcastic. "We're just random life support crew now."

"And Miss Potts," Tony drew her attention back to himself. "Since you're so eager to... I've got an errand for you," he said, offering her the slip of paper he'd been writing on. 

On a quick glance, it looked like a shopping list, but it didn't contain groceries. "What's this?"

"We're going to hit the bug with an EMP," he explained. "Which might kill it before it kills me. I need some supplies to modify the repulsors for this."

She stared at the list. Mostly it contained tools and stuff that made sense, but there was also, "Tin foil? A microwave oven?"

"Stuff that's easy to find. This is more MacGyver than my usual style, but I'm," he coughed, "on a tight schedule," he finished, placing the oxygen mask over his face again.

"Go with Kutner, he knows the building and has a pass that should open any doors and stop the guards from pestering you," House continued the explanation. "If they give you any trouble, tell them to call Cuddy, I'll call her first and let her know about this. She'll have no objections, since Stark has already promised to pay generously for everything he takes. The guards will keep waking her up, she'll be annoyed, and you'll be able to get the stuff. Everyone wins."

  


* * *

  


Rhodey had just gotten settled in his hotel room, opened his laptop, and was looking at the first of a long list of files on the screen, when Pepper Potts called. As she explained the news about how Tony's illness wasn't actually caused by a virus as they had thought, but some artificial thing, Rhodey eyed the file. It contained a list of research projects at Stark Industries biotech in Brazil, some of which were highlighted in bold, probably by Tony.

_Nanomaterials in Protective Clothing_  
 **Nanotechnology/Biology Interface - Risks, Benefits and Practical Possibilities in Medicine  
Nanotechnology in Genetic Engineering**  
Nano-sized Recording Devices  
 **Self-Replicating Nanotechnology in Biological Environments**

The list went on, but none of the other headings were marked. Pepper's uneasy explanation of what the doctors had found out coincided all too well with what Rhodey saw on the list. He sighed, shaking his head to himself. What a mess Tony had gotten himself into, once again... For a moment, Rhodey considered whether he should just leave the investigation for later and return to the hospital, but then again, this might prove useful and important. He'd stay where he was now.

"Tony sent me data that has to do with his sickness and the trouble in Brazil," he told Pepper. "I'm working on it now, I'll let you know instantly if I find out anything that might be helpful. Hang on in there, you two. Good night."

Rhodey skimmed through the stuff Tony had sent him, and downloaded a program that somehow connected Jarvis to his laptop so the AI could advice him. He quickly learned everything Tony had found out so far, and completely agreed that this looked big, and nasty. What Rhodey couldn't quite figure out was, where to go from here. As far as he saw, none of the data contained anything that would be useful to Tony right now. They'd need to reach some of the missing scientists for that, but Rhodey knew it was extremely unlikely he'd be able to, all alone and in the middle of the night. 

It was past 2 AM and as anxious as Rhodey was to do something to help, he was getting really tired. Finally, he settled on sending email to a S.H.I.E.L.D representative. They surely wouldn't answer before the morning, so he decided he might just as well try and get some sleep.

He'd barely slept a few hours when his cell phone rang. He was instantly wide awake, afraid that it was bad news about Tony, but instead, the caller introduced himself as "Agent Sitwell, S.H.I.E.L.D, currently standing behind your door, sir."

Rhodey got up, dressed quickly and opened the door to face the agent. Sitwell was young, and probably looked even younger than he was, thanks to his boyish, pimpled face. Even though they were well into the small hours, he didn't look tired, but eager and alert.

"I'm stationed hereabouts, I came as soon as I got your message," Sitwell said, his voice a nervous tenor matching his looks.

"Great, then you know what this is about already. I've got a lot of data I need to hand over to S.H.I.E.L.D, I'm sure you'll be able to handle this investigation far better than me alone. Um, is there some way..." he turned to glance at the laptop. He didn't think he should just forward the email he'd gotten from Tony, since it didn't contain the stuff directly, but directions to access and download it through Stark Industries intranet and servers.

Sitwell produced what looked like a standard USB memory stick from his pocket. "Just download it in here. This is S.H.I.E.L.D special issue, can be tracked if it's stolen and remotely triggered to explode, and the encryption is..."

"Yeah, really nifty," Rhodey interrupted the younger man, grabbed the memory stick and inserted it to the USB port in his laptop. He couldn't quite decide whether he was just amused or also annoyed by Sitwell's over-eager attitude.

He had only just started the download when his phone rang again. It was just the sort of call he had been fearing the last time.

"Rhodey?" Pepper sounded like she was on the verge of tears, or crying already. "It's... Tony's... He stopped breathing."

This time, Rhodey didn't waste time considering whether he should stay or go. "You can take care of this on your own, right? Just remember to close the door after you when you leave," Rhodey told Sitwell. He left the young agent to wait for the download to finish, and headed back to the hospital as fast as he could.

  


* * *

  


It had taken Tony over an hour to sketch a complete blueprint for what he was going to do. He'd used the helmet HUD and a gauntlet as an improvised 3D-modeling device, giving Jarvis an exact idea of what he had in mind. It'd been a strenuous hour, since he needed to close the faceplate to be able to see the screen, and he couldn't fit the oxygen mask inside the helmet. So, he'd work with the faceplate down until he started feeling so out of air that he was about to faint, then opened the helmet to catch his breath, and then went on working again. In the end, he was sure the effort had cost a good part of whatever time he had remaining before he got too sick to do anything at all, but he'd needed to do it anyway. If he couldn't finish this project himself, someone else would need to do it, and they needed instructions.

During his more than an hour of pre-planning, Pepper and Kutner had managed to gather everything he needed. Then, Tony had moved on to the actual tinkering. It wasn't too easy either, not when he was so spent that he needed to ask for help when he needed a bolt unscrewed. He had split open a gauntlet and was working on its insides. This was such a ridiculous bubblegum and duct tape sort of solution that anyone who had any knowledge of engineering would've laughed their asses off, unless they knew Tony's reputation and skills. He had pulled off such stunts before, and this was fairly simple - if he really had actually figured it out correctly, and the whole idea wasn't just an insane creation of a fever-ridden, oxygen-deprived mind.

How many hours since he'd last been able to draw breath properly? He had lost count. He'd gone over his situation with House, and House had been plain about it: it looked bad. Even if they managed to set off an EMP, they didn't know what, exactly its effects would be, and even if the EMP would stop the nanovirus, he might still be too sick to make it. It definitely wouldn't be long now before he wouldn't be able to breathe on his own anymore, and once they intubated him, he wouldn't be able to talk, and if things went bad...

He needed to talk to Pepper.

He put his work aside for a while, and asked for Thirteen, who was currently on call by his bedside, to go fetch her. House had left to catch a nap in his office, leaving his team to take turns watching over Tony. Tony had told Pepper to try and get some sleep as well. There was nothing she could do to help him right now, and she'd be more helpful later if she wasn't a completely sleep-deprived zombie. He could guess she wasn't probably sleeping anyway, so he didn't feel too guilty about waking her up in the middle of the night... or morning, or whatever the time was. Tony himself felt so bad in general and so fixed on the task at hand that he hardly even noticed his own lack of sleep.

Pepper appeared by his side in mere minutes. He couldn't see all of her face through the transparent part of the face of her protective suit, but her eyes told him enough. She didn't know why he'd called her here, but she could guess it wouldn't be anything nice.

"Pepper, there's something... I wanted to tell you," he struggled to get the words out properly with the little air he had. "If I don't make it..."

"Don't say that!" she cried out, her hand seeking his, once again.

He knew this wasn't the right way to do this. If he didn't make it, it'd only make her miserable, and if he did, it'd make things very awkward. But if he died without ever saying it to her straight up, without flirting, without innuendoes...

"You know I've made love... to more girls than we'd care to count," he began, cringing at himself for such a bad start. "But... Pepper... You're the only girl... I've ever loved."

She pulled her hand away from his, crossed her arms, and took a few steps back. As much as he tried, he couldn't read the look on her face. Sad, angry, surprised? Hadn't she guessed this much already? He'd been dropping her plenty of hints, but then again, he kept dropping hints at all the girls around him, just out of habit. And did she feel anything for him, anything more than friendship and loyalty?

She didn't say anything, but turned on her heel and walked out of the room.

Well, that went well, Tony thought to himself. Back to work, then. Now, in addition to everything else, there was a nasty suffocating feeling at his throat that had nothing to do with what was physically wrong with his body.

  


* * *

  


House turned around awkwardly, supporting his right thigh with both hands, and tugged the blanket a bit higher. No matter what he did, he couldn't find a comfortable position on his accustomed chair in his office. He couldn't sleep. His leg was paining him worse than it had in weeks, and his mind was too busy going over everything that'd happened.

It wasn't like him to lose sleep over a patient, but then again, he told himself, that wasn't what was going on tonight, either. He wasn't all "sob sob, oh no, but it's Tony Stark, he can't die". Instead, he was deeply annoyed by the pure impossibility of the case. He often spent sleepless nights thinking over a diagnosis, and this was the same sort of thing, except that they already had a diagnosis. "Hantavirus-like cardiopulmonary syndrome caused by a previously unknown bionanotechnological organism". It was worse than a diagnosis that was terminal and had no cure: it was something so alien that he had no means for understanding it properly. It was unfair. The universe wasn't playing by the rules anymore, tossing him with something like this.

He got up, stretching the muscles he'd already managed to jam while trying to sleep in an uncomfortable position. He decided he could just as well go and see how Stark was doing.

House was quite impressed by the fact that Stark was still awake and working. It was plain amazing that he was lucid at all. House glanced at the monitors, and grimaced. O2 sat was below acceptable levels, cardiac index had sunk lower while House had been trying to sleep - if this was some other patient in some other situation, House would've been seriously considering putting him on ECMO soon, but that wasn't an option here, with the EMP plan they had.

"Morning already?" Stark breathed, casting a sideways glance at House, most of his attention still on the vandalized Iron Man gauntlet he was working on. It looked like a piece of modern art built from scrap metal.

"For the very early birds."

"Why're you here, then?" Stark asked, with enough emphasis on the word "you" to make it clear that he didn't expect House to be an early riser.

"To gloat on my enemy when he's down, of course."

"Well, enjoy yourself... oh mighty Superdoc."

House sat down on a chair by the wall, next to Taub, who was on call. They sat in silence for over half an hour, Stark working, Taub and House just staring at him. 

Suddenly, without warning, Stark dropped the gauntlet, which fell to the floor, some of the parts he had attached to it coming off and flying into different directions. Several monitors were blaring with alarms. He was still struggling weakly to breathe, but obviously unable to get any air.

"We knew this was coming, sooner or later," House told Taub. "Get the intubation kit."


	6. "Our doctors are doing their best"

Pepper landed heavily on the sofa and buried her face in her hands, bending so low that her hands touched her knees, and she cried, all the tears she'd held back during the day and the endlessly long night.

"You're the only girl I've ever loved," Tony had said.

He had had to come this far before telling her that - only when he was lying on what might end up being his deathbed, he'd decided that he could let her know... She didn't know what to think, what to feel. 

She was angry beyond description - he should've told her earlier. Never mind that he'd kept her in the dark about the nanovirus and his company trouble, but to keep her in the dark about his feelings for her? Why'd he do that? Because he was afraid she wouldn't return the feelings? But he was Tony Stark, for God's sake, he knew all girls loved him! 

In that one account, Pepper was like all girls, but then again, not the same, because the others loved a portrait painted by the media, a public facade he kept, a man that didn't exist, and she loved the real Tony Stark, with all the flaws and the bad habits, but also the true heroism that no one who wasn't close to him could ever really know... And one part of her felt joyful, happy beyond imagining to know that it wasn't just one-sided after all, that he loved her too - if only he had told her about it earlier, in some happier circumstances, who knew what might've come out of it.

Above all else, she was anguished. It was like physical pain, like some icy hand gripping at her heart, to think that those might've been the last words he'd ever say to her.

She spent far too much time wrapped up in her thoughts, crying, trying desperately to get a grip on herself, and it took her far too long to realize what she had done. What he'd done, confessing his love like that, had been both wonderful and very mean at the same time, but what she'd done had been downright cruel. She'd walked out on him, left him unaware of why she'd done it, whether she'd rejected him or what... She needed to get back to him, and fast!

She was too late.

When she reached the outermost door of the decontamination-airlock-door system to his room, Taub stepped out through it. He looked slightly startled to see her there.

"Miss Potts, I was just about to go looking for you. Mr. Stark was going into respiratory arrest, we've now hooked him up to a ventilator and he's stable again, for the moment."

She stared at the doctor, not really grasping what he said. Tony was... what? He'd almost stopped breathing, that was what. But she needed to talk to him! 

"Can I go see him?" she asked.

"Of course, but he's unconscious, we sedated him for the intubation. Makes it easier on both us and him. Having a tube stuffed down your throat isn't exactly a pleasant experience."

Pepper needed to see him nevertheless, so she walked past the doctor, suited up and entered Tony's room. As she stepped in, all she saw was him, in the center of the room, on the bed, completely still and silent - which was something he never, ever was.

She stopped by his side, and placed her hand on the arc reactor on his chest. It was just as before, unchanged, glowing its soft blue light. The one part of him that hadn't been affected by this illness, though it wasn't a real part of him, it was a device that kept his heart safe. Her eyes followed the tube leading from his mouth to the machine that was now breathing for him, and she shivered. What next? How many machines did it take to keep him alive?

She slid her hand upwards, cupping the side of his face. "There's something I need to tell you, Tony. But I want you to be awake, it won't do any good otherwise," she whispered to him.

She stood there, by his side, for a good long while, before she realized she wasn't alone in the room. In the corner, surrounded by the tools and spare parts she and Kutner had collected, sat a figure in a protective suit. She didn't know who it was. Then, the person looked up - and though the transparent window in the suit's face, she saw the red-and-gold face of Iron Man.

She stumbled back a few steps, bewildered. What was going on in here? Was she still asleep?

"Don't mind me, I wouldn't want to disturb your cute, angsty moment," the helmet-headed person told her, and even though the helmet changed his voice, she could instantly recognize House's ironic tone.

"You! How... How dare you!" she stuttered.

"Someone has to finish this," he motioned at the Iron Man gauntlet which he was working on. "And I always wanted to try on the helmet."

"No, take it off!"

"Look, seriously," House said matter-of-factly, "he asked me to."

"But he hates you, why would he want you to continue his work?"

"Because we have things in common, and I'm not talking about how we're both superhuman über-geniuses. Neither of us can accept defeat, and we're both prepared to use almost any means to get what we want. Me, maybe even a bit more than him," House explained.

It almost made sense to her, and it sounded like the two had finally reached an understanding, which she was glad about, but to see House wearing Tony's helmet, and Tony lying there so helpless... It was too weird, too wrong. She couldn't take it. She ran out of the room again.

She collapsed on the first chair she could find, and called Rhodes, though she could barely say anything that made sense. Then she sat there, staring at the floor in a haze, a semi-conscious, half-asleep state. Rhodes arrived, talked to her, asked if she was all right, and she mumbled something in response. He was going to see Tony, but she didn't want to follow, she felt like she couldn't stand seeing him again.

She had drifted into a dreamless, yet restless sleep, when her phone rang. As she answered it, she looked at the time. 8 AM already.

"Miss Potts, this is Doctor Lisa Cuddy. I hope I didn't wake you up?"

"It's okay," she replied sleepily.

"I know this is a really short notice, but I can't stall the media any longer, we need to give an official statement. I'm making arrangements for a press conference at 11 AM. I take it that you've got something to tell? House hinted that there's a diagnosis."

"Sure..."

She finished the conversation as quickly as she could, agreeing to meet Doctor Cuddy at the hospital cafeteria at 10. Before that, she needed to find a shower, change her clothes, and somehow collect the fragmented mess that was her mind. 

How on earth could she handle a press conference now? She didn't do those often, Tony did, because he was brilliant at them and the media loved him. But he couldn't, now, and that left her and Rhodes. He was military, while she was employed by Stark Industries. Besides, she had meant what she'd told Tony earlier. She wasn't a damsel in distress who needed protection. She'd do it.

They couldn't tell the truth about the nanovirus, that would be a disaster, it would cause a panic in the public and would be very bad for the company. The solution came to her quickly: just tell everyone it's the hantavirus. It was almost true. She'd have to lie in front of all those people and cameras, but she'd manage. For Tony.

  


* * *

  


Lisa Cuddy had had yet another sleepless night courtesy of Gregory House, MD. He'd woken her up with a phone call at around half past one, with some vague explanation about how Tony Stark needed some supplies for some insane engineering project, and that he'd borrow them from the hospital and pay lavishly for it. Since Stark really was rich and they could use the money, and they were talking about tools and such things, not medical equipment - and because she just wanted to go back to sleep and not be pestered by House any longer - she had said OK.

Less than fifteen minutes after House's call, the first guard had called. She'd gotten four phone calls like that during the next few hours. Puzzled guards and one nurse on a night shift had told her that people were sneaking around the hospital, taking things, and that one of them had the ID of Doctor Kutner of the Diagnostics Department. "Yes yes, I know about this, it's all right, let them take whatever they want," she'd tell them, bury her head under the pillow and try to fall asleep while waiting for the next call.

At quarter past seven in the morning, when she'd actually caught a few hours of solid sleep, she received another sort of phone call, and then, a few more, and when she opened her email inbox, she found it flooded with over a hundred new messages. The media. She'd been doing her best to hold them at bay, but this was the third day for Stark at Princeton-Plainsboro, and they really needed to tell them something. So, she started arranging things for a press conference, and called Stark's assistant. Miss Potts sounded tired and distressed, and Cuddy could only wonder what had been going on during the night. She tried calling House to ask about it, but he didn't answer. Typical. She did reach Thirteen, who told her that Stark had HPS, and his condition was deteriorating rapidly.

Cuddy met Potts at the cafeteria for late breakfast. Despite the way she'd sounded on the phone, Stark's assistant looked sharp enough, her hair neatly done, and the signs of a sleepless night on her face expertly covered by make-up.

"How can you put up with House? I mean, I know he's brilliant, but he's just so..." Potts asked her over a cup of coffee.

"Such a total jerk?" Cuddy answered, smirking. "Well, from what I hear, people have asked the same question about you and Mr. Stark," she said, and only when she'd finished the sentence, she realized how inconsiderate it was of her - Stark was badly ill, after all.

Potts looked down at the table, a wave of emotion going over her face, but it passed quickly. She looked up again and chuckled, wistfully, but smiling nevertheless. "Oh, you have no idea."

Cuddy and Potts spent most of the hour before the press conference on small talk instead of business, because they didn't have that very many details to go over. The news they had to give was clear enough, and they agreed that they would keep the event as short as possible, no extra questions answered.

The auditorium of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital was filled to its brim. During all her time as hospital administrator, Cuddy had never had this many media people gathered here. It was no wonder there were so many. Everything Stark did was a major news event, and his being sick was not only interesting to the public, but also affected his company stock. Luckily, having a large audience wasn't a problem for Cuddy. She didn't enjoy public speaking and didn't consider herself much of a rhetorician, but she wasn't afraid of talking to large crowds, and she knew how to handle people. It was part of her job, after all. She was slightly worried about Potts, though - she seemed edgy, eyeing the gathered reporters like they were an execution crew.

They stepped on the podium, and the whole hall fell silent, as if everyone was holding their breath.

"I'm Doctor Cuddy, Dean of Medicine of this hospital. I know you have all been waiting for almost three days to hear something, and I'm sorry we have kept you in the dark. It was necessary, as it took our doctors this long to find out what is wrong with Mr. Stark. Here's Miss Potts, his personal assistant," she motioned at Potts to step to the microphone.

Cuddy felt impressed as she noticed that the look on Potts's face had changed completely. It was now stern with resolve, almost cold. "I'm afraid the news aren't good," she spoke in a steady voice. "Mr. Stark is ill with hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a potentially deadly disease. The next day or so will show if he survives."

The hall exploded with a hubbub of questions, but Cuddy silenced them with a wave of her hands and spoke again. "Our doctors are doing their best. Doctor Gregory House is responsible for the case, and he's the best we have."

"This has no effect whatsoever on the running of Stark Industries," Potts added. No word of Iron Man, Cuddy thought, and the reporters had noticed it as well, since she could hear the word in their shouted inquiries and their talk amongst themselves.

"We will let you know as soon as we have more news. This is all we have to say for now," Cuddy finished.

The noise became even louder, the air still full of questions - "What about Iron Man?" "Can we interview Stark?" "How contagious is this disease?" "Where did he get it from?" and so on, endlessly.

Cuddy spoke up again. "We're not taking any questions. Good day."

Potts was looking nervous and shaky again, so Cuddy took her by the hand and lead the way out of the auditorium. Once they'd reached the hallway, they went their separate ways, Potts to visit her employer, Cuddy to her office.

She found Kutner, Taub and Thirteen there, waiting for her. "Doctor Cuddy," Taub said. "We could use some help. We need to evacuate the patients from the rooms around where Stark's staying."

  


* * *

  


Tony blinked, trying to force his sleepy, blurry vision to focus on the nearly finished EMP-device.

He was feeling beyond bad, he just felt incredibly weird. He'd never experienced anything like this. It was an experience he could've lived without, too. His system was still full of drugs, so he was drowsy, like he was almost, but not quite, drunk enough to pass out. And there was the plastic tube going all the way down his throat, and the machine filling his failing lungs with air.

The situation was made even weirder by the fact that House now wore the Iron Man helmet under his protective suit, so Jarvis could lead him through the adjustments. From what Tony could see, they were doing a good job, too. House had successfully repaired the damage the device had taken when it'd fallen to the floor. He obviously didn't understand what he was doing, but he was very precise, and had steady hands.

Fine, but could use some flair, Tony wrote on the clipboard he was now using to communicate. His handwriting was horrible, but apparently House could read it, since he answered.

"I'll paint little golden Iron Man -figures on it once I've made the last connections."

House returned to his place in the corner of the room to continue working. Tony closed his eyes. He had no idea what time it was. He hadn't seen Pepper since she'd walked out on him. Rhodey had stopped by a few times. The last time he'd said he'd go and check on the investigation and return later, and Tony hadn't heard from him since. Then, it'd been just him and House in here, plus occasional visits from the younger doctors in House's team.

It occurred to Tony that this was like some freakishly twisted re-enactment of what had happened in Afghanistan, with House, of all people, playing the role of Yinsen. Of course, everything was different, the situation, the surroundings, the people, but still, here he was, dying because of something that he'd helped to create - although saying that he was responsible for the nanovirus in any way was stretching it - and fighting to save his own life through technology.

He was drifting towards sleep or unconsciousness, when suddenly, a hand landed softly on his chest, on the arc reactor. He knew who it was before he'd even opened his eyes. He felt his weakened heart skip faster with the thought.

"Tony? Are you awake?"

He raised his eyebrows and blinked a few times to let her know.

"Go away. Give us a moment alone," Pepper shouted at House. To his surprise, Tony heard no sarcastic protests, but the sounds of House getting up, limping to the door and out of the room.

She went on as soon as the door had closed. "Tony, I just need you to know... how much you mean to me. You're like an arc reactor," she said, tapping the device lightly with her slender fingers. "I'm sure my heart would stop if you'd die."

She paused, and he stared at her, amazed. He'd hardly ever seen her this sentimental, and he'd never dared to hope to hear such words from her.

"So, I guess, what I'm trying to say is, I love you too, Tony Stark," she finished.

Tony reached for the clipboard and drew a little heart on it, with "Tony" and "Pepper" written on its sides. Tony loves Pepper. Then he crossed out the heart, and sketched a tiny arc reactor above it, to replace it.

She grinned at him, but before she got to saying anything, there was a noise from the door, and the sound of uneven footsteps. House had returned. 

"Visiting hour is over," he declared. "It's almost time to start shooting at the bad guys. Bugs. Nanoviruses. You know what I mean."

  


* * *

  


House had to use every bit of patience and resolve he'd got to keep himself from going "eww" at the mushy conversation he was eavesdropping on. Well, at least that solved one mystery: no, Stark and Potts had not had a relationship before they came here, probably simply because they'd been shy as seventeen-year-olds about opening up to each other about their feelings. Now, with him dying of the nanovirus and her of worry, they'd finally talked things through.

Once Potts had told what she'd come to tell and Stark had answered him in writing (which House couldn't see, which slightly annoyed him), he stepped into the room again. He wondered if the thought had even crossed the couple's mind that he might've been spying on them. Probably not, they were too into each other to think about something like that.

"That wasn't very nice of you," a refined voice with a British accent spoke in his ear. House had forgotten about the damn AI - when he wore the helmet, it'd know exactly what he was looking at, or listening to. He wouldn't be bothered by the AI much longer, though, since the helmet's internal power source would run out soon. Luckily, he only needed its help a while longer.

"Shut up. I'm sure you're just jealous at her because you're in love him too," House quipped. For a computer program, Jarvis had an excellent sense of irony, so he figured it would understand.

House made his way to the corner where he'd been working, and grabbed the gauntlet. "What do you think?"

"I'm an artificial intelligence, Doctor House, and a such, I don't really think. However, it is a perfect match to the parameters given by Mr. Stark."

House needed Stark's opinion as well, because Jarvis could only know what Stark had programmed in it, and lacked the intuition and the technical genius that had created the design. So, he walked over and placed it on Stark's lap, even though Stark was staring at him murderously. Potts was wearing more of an embarrassed, "caught in the act" sort of a look.

Stark went over the device carefully, lifting it closer to his face, turning it this way and that. "A device" might've been too fancy a word for it, though. It was a collection of scavenged parts attached to a mangled Iron Man gauntlet, and it looked just like what it was. House wondered if it'd really do anything at all.

Perfect, Stark wrote. When can we do it?

"I sent my minions to handle the evacuation of the nearby rooms. Then, we need to see to the things in this room. After that, we're all set."

House was glad they had had time to go over the details of the plan before they'd had to intubate Stark. Stark had assured him that the EMP the device produced would have a very small radius, so small that it should be limited to his room alone. Nevertheless, they had agreed that it would be safest to relocate the patients who were Stark's neighbors, just in case. A worst case scenario would be that Stark had miscalculated completely and the device would cause a major blackout, but there was nothing they could do to prepare for that. To announce it to the authorities in advance would mean giving out a clue that this was something more than just a regular case of HPS, and they couldn't do that.

Then, there was the problem of the medical paraphernalia currently surrounding Stark. Most of it was for monitoring purposes, so removing it wouldn't harm him. The IV could be switched to a simple drip instead of an infusion pump, so that was easy as well. They could move the equipment out of the room, and if the EMP should go wider than they expected, they could bring in new ones from elsewhere in the hospital. Stark had enough money that the expenses would not be an issue. The ventilator was the biggest concern, since it was clear enough that Stark would quickly suffocate without it. So, they needed to have someone bagging him manually all through the process. Tedious, but they had no choice.

The real problem was how they were going to handle Stark himself when they triggered the EMP. Stark had assured House that the all-important arc reactor was shielded - or rather, "should be perfectly shielded, but it's never been tested". Stark had given House the same answer when he'd asked what would happen if they needed to defibrillate him. "It should be okay." So many unknown, unpredictable variables. House didn't like it.

It took them the better part of an hour to finish all the preparations. During that time, Stark fell unconscious. That wasn't very fair of him, House thought - this way, Stark wouldn't be around to take the blame if his science project went haywire and caused a city-wide chaos. Potts never left his side, and once Colonel Rhodes, apparently a good old friend of Stark's, returned, he stayed glued to Stark's bedside as well.

Finally, it was all done. They took their positions: Potts and Rhodes standing by the wall, out of the way, Thirteen bagging Stark, Kutner standing by in case something unexpected happened, and Taub waiting outside with a few nurses and the medical equipment.

House himself, naturally, played the coolest part of their little drama. Standing next to the bed, he connected a wire from the EMP device to Stark's arc reactor, which worked as the power source.

He looked around, the modified gauntlet in one hand, a finger held dramatically over the button that'd set off the EMP. 

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "It's showtime."

And he flipped the switch.


	7. "That's it?"

Full of apprehension, Tony watched as House discharged the EMP.

Contrary to what he'd expected, he actually felt it hit him, like a small electric shock. All the lights blinked out, leaving them in pitch-dark.

It took Tony a few seconds to realize that it was really, completely dark. No blue glow. Despite the shielding, his arc reactor had failed. He could already feel the worsening pain in his chest. For some reason, no one else had noticed, or something had gone wrong, because no one was helping him. He could've been alone in the dark for all he knew. He tried to call out for help, but, of course, he couldn't shout when he couldn't breathe on his own.

He grabbed the arc reactor, yanked it out, shook it, smashed it hard against his palm, but it stayed dead. There was nothing he could do.

A horrible, sharp, tearing pain pierced his heart.

Then, he died.

He woke up to see House standing next to his bed, the EMP-device in one hand, his finger over the switch. And he set it off.

Instantly, the whole device exploded in a huge ball of fire and lighting. The air was full of smoke, everyone in the room was screaming in pain, their clothes on fire, including Tony, who couldn't do anything but lie helplessly in his bed and burn alive.

And he woke up again. The third time, he realized that this was completely ridiculous and he had to be dreaming, but it didn't help. Instead, it made things worse: it removed all the realistic limitations that had been there before.

Since he knew it was a dream, Tony was able to watch as they detonated the device and the EMP went wide, far wider than he'd expected, sweeping through the hospital. Omnipresent, he saw how all electronic equipment shut down, how patient after patient died as their life-support failed - an old man who was in a coma slipping away, the life of a pretty, young girl snuffed out as she lay on the operating table with her chest cut open... And it spread even wider. Outside the hospital, he saw cars stop dead in the streets, neon signs and streetlights go out, chaos and mayhem breaking out everywhere, until there was nothing but darkness...

The next time, he found himself standing beside his own body, witnessing himself go into cardiac arrest. Kutner picked up the paddles and tried to defibrillate him, but instead of fixing his heart, the electric shock completely fried the arc reactor, which stopped working too, and so, he died again.

Tony was starting to feel like he was the main character in a computer game where the goal was to keep him alive, and the one playing the game couldn't get it right no matter what they did, so they had to keep reloading again and again. Or like he was stuck in Groundhog Day, or that one episode of Xena the Warrior Princess, except that there was nothing he could do to influence what was going on.

After everything even remotely realistic had already happened, the scenarios got even more absurd: House was about to launch the EMP, when the door to the room opened, and Obadiah Stane stepped through. First, he used the sonic device to paralyze everyone and shot them in cold blood - Pepper, Rhodey, House, all of them. Then he walked to Tony's bedside, told him "You thought you won, but you never will!" and pulled out the arc reactor.

On one hand, Tony desperately wanted to wake up and get out of this endless loop of nightmares. On the other, he was terrified of learning the truth. What if it was like one of these worst case scenarios, or even worse?

  


* * *

  


Like House had expected, the event itself wasn't nearly as dramatic as his introduction had suggested. There was hardly anything to see or to feel. The device fizzled and threw a few sparks, and the lamps directly above it blinked out. Without them, the middle of the room, the area around Stark's bed, was left in a dimmer light than the rest, the soft blue glow of the arc reactor standing out clearly.

"Wow," House whispered soundlessly to himself. If the EMP had turned off those lights, then its range really had been just as limited as Stark had said. Estimating from the darkened area in the ceiling, House could visualize how it had emanated from the device in a sphere that just reached each wall of the room. Very precise. He was genuinely impressed. And everything looked promising so far.

"That's it?" Kutner broke the silence, sounding dumbstruck and somewhat disappointed.

"Yup. Roll end credits. Let's go home," House replied the dumb question with a dumb answer. "But wait, look, oh my God, there's a patient on that bed! I wonder if he's all right?"

The stupefied stillness lasted for a few more seconds, and then - finally - his team dashed into action. Kutner knocked on the door leading out and shouted for Taub to get in. As he and the nurses started rushing to the room with the medical equipment, House turned towards Stark.

To his annoyance, he quickly realized that there was hardly anything he could say about Stark's condition right now. The cumbersome protective clothing House wore kept him from doing anything he'd normally have done. Even if he'd had a stethoscope, which he hadn't, he wouldn't have been able to listen to anything since his ears were covered - besides, if there was a background hum from the arc reactor, it would have been an ear-splitting experience anyway. Almost the same went for trying to check his patient's pulse: the gloves covering his hands were too thick for him to feel much of anything. So, basically, before they got the monitors online again, he couldn't even tell if Stark still had a heartbeat. Berating himself mentally for not thinking about this earlier, House joined the others in setting up everything.

Good thing that the EMP had worked so well. Since it had been so small-range, they had perfectly working power outlets in the room. The fact that they had plenty of light made things easier too, because having to rely on flashlights and portable lamps would've slowed them down. With four doctors and three nurses in the room, their work was quickly done.

As soon as they had the leads attached, the EKG monitor bleeped an alarm, showing ventricular tachycardia with a heart rate of 164. So, apparently the patient still had a heartbeat, but probably not for long, unless they did something to fix the rhythm.

Kutner had already grabbed the paddles, but House held out a hand in a stop-sign, palm outwards. "Hold your horses, my daredevil Defibrillist," he ordered. He eyed Stark's upper body, his gaze stopping at the silvery arc reactor gleaming in the dimmed light. Shocking someone who had an inbuilt magnet/generator/whatever in their chest had "bad idea" written all over it. "Let's try drugs first. Start him on amiodarone," House decided. Kutner frowned at him. That wasn't going by the book, but following rules blindly never was House's thing.

"His fever's spiked," Thirteen shouted, catching House's attention. He checked the reading - 106.8. Not good. Definitely not good. 

"We can't have that. Acetaminophen for the fever... And someone get a blood sample, run to the lab and stare at it for a while. I'd like to know what the hell's going on in there." 

House had no idea what was going on in Stark's body. Was the VT due to the high fever, or was it a sign of his heart failing because of the disease, or were both effects of their shot at "treating" the thing? House could see three options. One, the EMP had done nothing, which meant that the symptoms were a sign that the disease was getting worse, and might kill Stark in a matter of minutes. Two, the EMP had worked and deactivated the nanovirus, and now Stark's immune system had to fight the mess still left in his body, which would explain the fever quite well. Three, the EMP had caused something unexpected, like made all the nanoviruses explode - but House would've expected even worse and stranger symptoms from some freak reaction like that.

He glanced at the EKG again. Still VT, but the heart rate had slowed down, and at least it hadn't deteriorated into ventricular fibrillation yet, which was promising. After the drugs had been administered, there wasn't a whole lot they could do but wait and see. House reckoned that if Stark started getting better, then the EMP had probably worked, and if he kept getting worse, then it hadn't. Then again, it was also possible that he'd survive the disease even if the EMP had done nothing at all. So, unless Stark's blood gave some clue, they couldn't be sure what had happened. 

First, House had a puzzle that he couldn't solve because he simply couldn't understand it. Now, if the patient started getting better, he wouldn't know why. This had to be the single most frustrating case he had ever had.

"What's going on?" Colonel Rhodes asked commandingly, stepping away from the wall and closer to Stark's bed. "Did it work?"

"How should I know?" House answered sardonically. "I just work here."

"I'm not taking any of that from you," Rhodes grumbled. "Just tell me, is he going to get better?"

"Honestly, I have no idea. Only time will tell."

Time gave them hope. It only took some minutes before Stark's heartbeat settled into a stable sinus tachycardia. "Sorry, Defibrillator-Man, you can put those away," House told Kutner, who'd been standing frozen in his place, with the paddles at ready, all through the scene. "Too bad, you won't be able to add 'getting zapped when trying to defib a guy with an arc reactor' to your list of heroic feats, after all."

Stark's fever had come down a bit as well, but it was still dangerously high. Despite repeated attempts, they couldn't rouse him, though he did respond to pain, trying to withdraw his hand when House pinched his finger. It wasn't unexpected that he was unconscious, not after the way he'd taxed his already exhausted body, working on the EMP device through the night. Then again, slipping into a coma would not be an encouraging sign.

Taub returned from the lab to tell them that "I could still spot nanoviruses in his blood."

"So it didn't work?" Stark's assistant exclaimed, sounding desperate.

"Still can't tell," House replied, annoyed both at her and the uncertainty of the situation. "It might be inactive and just waiting for its doom even though it's still there." But, House thought to himself, at least it showed the bugs hadn't been blasted into tiny bits or anything like that, so it ruled out option number three.

"If it's inactive, then we can't get it anymore, can we? It's no longer contagious?"

"If, then yes. But it's a big If. Very iffy."

"Actually... I really don't care," Potts muttered, and started pulling off her gloves.

  


* * *

  


Worried out of her wits, Pepper waited and stared as the doctors worked on Tony. She didn't know if the EMP had done what it was supposed to, since she really hadn't known what to expect. She also couldn't follow what was going on. Tony was still unconscious and looked every bit as sick as before. The only things she could understand were Kutner grabbing the paddles, which looked like a bad sign, and the fact that Tony's fever was even higher than before. She felt useless, just standing here like this. She guessed Rhodes felt the same way, and his outburst at House made that even clearer.

When Taub returned and told that there still were nanoviruses in Tony's blood, she felt like all her hopes had been crushed, but then House pointed out that this might be good. The nanoviruses might be inactive. If they were, then she would be safe even without the protective clothing. And if they weren't, well, then Tony was going to die, wasn't he? She had always considered herself a more or less realistic and practical person, and definitely not a Romeo and Juliet -scale hopeless romantic. Yet now she found herself thinking that if Tony was going to die, she really couldn't care less about her own health.

She pulled off one protective glove, then the other, and opened the hood, which contained the air filtering system. By this time, Rhodes had realized what she was up to, and tried to stop her, grabbing both her arms in a strong grip and pinning them against her sides. "Miss Potts! Pepper! Are you out of your mind?"

"Rhodey, you're too late," she told him. "I've already exposed myself to the air."

He knew she was telling the truth. He let go of her arms, and shook his head at her. "I hope you know what you're doing," he said.

"Now we're going to have to keep you in isolation as well, Miss Potts," Thirteen pointed out. "Maybe for quite a long time, too, since we don't know exactly how the disease progresses in the early stages, when will the nanoviruses show up in blood samples, and so on."

Pepper hadn't even thought about that, but she didn't care. At the moment, this felt like the right thing to do. She felt better than a moment ago, not as helpless, and energetic, with an unexpected adrenaline rush that doing something so extreme, more than a bit crazy, had caused. She stripped off the rest of the protective clothing, and stood there, in nothing but her regular clothes.

With everyone else staring at her in a stunned silence, she crossed the room to Tony's bedside, and then forgot that there was anyone else in the room. She swept back the damp hair from his forehead. It felt so hot with fever that he was practically radiating warmth. In the dim light, the arc reactor's glow cast strange bluish shadows on his pale face, in a horrible illusion that made him look like he was dead. She covered the reactor with her hand. It felt cool to the touch, unlike the skin around it. The changed light wasn't much better, though - now Tony's face looked gray instead of blue and white.

A chair appeared behind her, apparently brought there by Rhodes. She sat down on it, and took Tony's hand between hers, intertwining her fingers with his. She couldn't have done any of this properly if she'd still been wearing the protection, and if Tony was going to die, this was the way things should be, with Pepper by his side, until the very end.

In the room around her, people gradually returned to action. House sent away the nurses ("Don't you have anywhere else to be?"), and set his team to run some more tests. Pepper stayed where she was, so that they had to work around her, but they didn't complain. 

Rhodes stopped by her side, and stood there silently, looking at Tony as well, and resting a comforting hand on her shoulder. He stayed there for some time - could've been an hour, could've been five minutes - and then, squeezed her shoulder and let go. "I've got to go away again for a while, I promised I'd be in touch with the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. I'll be back as soon as I can."

"Okay," Pepper mumbled. As she watched him walk out, she wondered if Rhodey could guess anything, if he could see that things had somehow changed between her and Tony, and what he would think about it. But she quickly forgot the thought, placing it in the folder in her mind labeled "later", which she would consider thinking about once Tony got better.

More time passed. She didn't bother keeping track of it. At one point, Kutner addressed her, telling her that things were actually looking better for Tony, and that the worst was probably over. She rewarded the good news with a smile, but didn't say anything.

After another timeless while of sitting there, his hand held between hers, Tony grasped her hand.

Pepper jumped, startled by the sudden sign of life from him. She stood up, her hand still in his, and looked at his face. He was gazing towards her, his eyes feverishly bright and clearly unfocused, and his expression surprised and confused.

He lifted her hand with his onto his chest, over the arc reactor, and with his other hand, pointed first at himself and then at her, calling to mind his earlier drawing. He still looked confused, or maybe in doubt, eyebrows raised inquiringly.

Feeling more conscious than before of the fact that there were others in the room with them, Pepper smiled at Tony. "Yes, Tony. I meant it. And we're both still alive."

Tony seemed content with that, closed his eyes, and went back to sleep. Somehow, she thought, he looked better now. More relaxed, with less furrows on his brow.

  


* * *

  


"Hey!" Doctor James Wilson exclaimed, as Greg House grabbed the larger half of his peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

"It's for medical purposes," House answered. "I can't remember when I last ate. I might just pass out on the floor of your office any minute now."

Knowing House and the case he was suddenly working on, Wilson thought it was probably true, too. When House got really interested about a case, he wouldn't let little things like sleep or food distract him. But Wilson wasn't about to give up this easily. "Amber made these for me, you know."

"Oh, and you think she guessed I was going to come along when you're eating and pick the bigger half, so she poisoned it? That sneaky bitch!" House said, and bit into the sandwich.

Wilson sighed. Why did he even try? They ate in silence, and House stole what remained of Wilson's coffee before he could drink it himself. Well, it was probably cold and tasted awful anyway. Then, House just sat there, unusually silent, staring at Wilson expectantly. Yeah, Wilson could easily guess what this was about. "All right, I'll ask. How's your superhero?"

"I can't tell you, that's top secret. Men in Black would appear and sweep our memories if I did."

"Oh, come on, House, I know you're burning to tell me!"

"But how badly do you want to know?"

"I'm not the one who's fanatic about this sort of stuff," Wilson said, stood up and took a few steps as if to leave the room.

"Well, all right," House said, not so surprisingly, and Wilson returned to his chair. "He's not super, but he's getting better," House told smugly.

"It's not really thanks to you, though, is it? I mean, it was HPS, so what could you do? Or did you come up with some unheard-of drug that's not yet past trials?"

"Well..." House raised his eyebrows and smirked. "You could say that."

"It was HPS, wasn't it?"

"You could say that, too."

"So, it wasn't! That explains. I was wondering how you'd be this fascinated about a hantavirus infection, but I thought it was just the patient that made the case cool... What was it, then?"

"That's something I really can't tell you," House said, his tone slightly more serious.

"I heard rumors about people getting evacuated from the rooms surrounding Stark's, what was that about?"

"Engineering project. He was bored. It was pretty neat, actually. You know, he really is a genius. I think he might be almost as smart as I am!"

"Since when have you started liking hypocritical wannabe world-savers?" - which was what House had called Stark earlier, when he and Wilson had last discussed the subject.

"I haven't. But Stark's cool."


	8. "Good news!"

Tony was going through the longest, maybe the most tormenting dream so far. House had flipped the switch, but nothing had happened. The device hadn't done anything at all. So, Tony lived through the last minutes or hours of his life as his body irrevocably, completely succumbed to the nanovirus. The doctors kept throwing everything they could think of at it, House coming up with countless ideas, none of which helped at all, and some even made Tony worse. He observed it all both from a spectator's view, watching the desperation in the room, Pepper's tears, Rhodey's anger and sadness, the doctors' frustration, and, at the same time, through his failing body, feeling the overwhelming sickness, the pain, the final, faint fluttering of his heart, the inevitable knowledge that this was the end...

When he woke up again, still shaken by the horrible experience, House and the EMP device were nowhere to be seen. It took Tony some time to realize that his vision wasn't as clear as before, but blurred, and he couldn't focus his eyes properly, and he was no longer omnipresent, but confined to the narrow view from his bed. His thoughts were awfully sluggish as well, and rambling - it was nearly impossible to concentrate, let alone stay coherent. He felt just as bad as in the previous nightmare. He wondered what this scenario was about, whether this was yet another "no EMP" thing, or maybe he was going to die all alone this time, or something like that.

He tried to concentrate on the surroundings. The lamps in the ceiling above him were dark, but there was light everywhere else, which was new. With huge effort, he turned his head slightly, and saw Pepper sitting next to his bed, and realized that she was holding his hand. He squeezed it tentatively, her small, slender fingers cool against his burning skin. Her beautiful face looked so sad, but her strawberry-blonde hair and freckles and blue eyes stood out vividly, despite the dim light and his fuzzy vision. It all felt very real. Could he be awake? Really awake?

She flinched at his touch and looked at him. Pepper... Had she really said that she loved him, or had that been a dream as well? He tried to think back to the memories of what had happened before the dreams began, but it was all hazy, a jumble of more or less realistic nightmares, of the frenetic hours spent working on the device, and pieces of conversations that he couldn't put together properly.

He was still unable to speak because he wasn't breathing on his own, and he wondered whether he could've put together a sentence that made any sense anyway. Still, he had to know if it had been true. His limbs felt like lead, but he dragged up his hand, lifting hers with it, placing them on the arc reactor, and he pointed at himself and at her, willing her to understand, and she did. She told him she had meant it. It had been true, and this was true, this wasn't a dream. That was all he needed to hear.

Tony went back to sleep, and this time, there were no more bad dreams.

The second time he came to, he knew it was real. The lamps above him were still dark, and in addition to Pepper, who hadn't moved from her place, Rhodey was there too, standing by his other side. On some level, Tony registered the strange fact that Rhodey wore a hazmat suit but Pepper was in her regular clothes. He didn't know what to make of it. They were both smiling at him.

"Way to go, man," Rhodey said, and shook his hand firmly.

"Welcome back again," Pepper greeted, smoothing the hair from his clammy forehead.

Tony still felt like death warmed over, so dizzy that it made him nauseous even though he was lying down, but thinking wasn't as hard as before. He sought for the clipboard, and Pepper handed it to him. His hand lax and lacking the coordination for anything complicated, he wrote, _WTF?_

Pepper chuckled. "The EMP device worked like you said it would, and you're getting better. They still don't know if the device actually did anything to the virus, but you beat the disease anyway."

"Iron Man kicked ass, as usual," Rhodey added with a grin.

Tony drew a happy smiley, and went back to sleep again.

The third time he woke up, he felt much better. Unfortunately, this time, it wasn't Pepper and Rhodey by his side, but House and Kutner. Tony grimaced with distaste.

"That's no way to greet your saviors," House sneered. Tony scowled at him. Damn this stupid tube stuffed into his windpipe - he seriously needed to be able to return that with an equal load of wit and sarcasm.

With a sound of fast footsteps, Pepper ran to Tony's rescue. "Tony! Good morning!" she shouted, and her face emerged between the doctors, positively beaming at him.

"Good to see you awake, Mr. Stark. And we've got some good news for you," Kutner told. Amusingly enough, he looked like he was a bit annoyed at House, too. "Your lungs are looking much better, so we're here to suggest that we could try extubating you. Getting you off the ventilator, that is."

_YES!!!!1_ , Tony scribbled on the clipboard, wondering if anyone got the joke.

A moment later, when Kutner was pulling at the tube, Tony almost hoped he had said no instead. One more thing to the list of stuff he'd gladly have skipped. He gagged and felt like he was suffocating, and suddenly had a detailed flashback of pulling an even longer and slimier tube out of his nose when he'd woken up in Afghanistan - and then everything faded to black.

He jolted awake to House's grating voice shouting, "Hey! Stark! You Iron moron, the idea was to keep breathing, not to stop doing it!"

He breathed in, sweet, fresh air from the oxygen mask someone had slapped over his face. As soon as he'd gathered enough air to speak, he answered House. "That's... Mr. Stark, to you... and great job... trying to kill... your patient... once again... Doctor Dimwit."

For the first time in days, although breathing was strenuous and his throat felt like he had swallowed a box of nails, Tony felt wonderful.

After they'd made sure that his readings were OK and he was going to keep breathing, the doctors finally left him alone with Pepper. To his puzzlement, Tony noticed that she was wearing an ugly hospital gown now, the same as he was, while the doctors had been in full protective suits.

"What's up... with the... fashion statement?" he croaked at her.

"Um, I... I'm in isolation. Because... I guess I sort of flipped, when I thought you were going to die, so I got rid of the protection..." she stuttered, sounding more than a bit embarrassed. "So I'm stuck here with you until they can be certain that I haven't caught the nanovirus too."

Tony stared at her in disbelief, feeling like his mind had just done a somersault. At first, there was worry for her - he'd never forgive himself if she'd get this horrible sickness too - but then again, he was sure the EMP device had killed the nanovirus like they had hoped it would. He couldn't possibly have survived if it hadn't.

As the concern passed, he came to think about the positive sides of the situation. Whoa. It was a bit overwhelming. Stuck in this not-too-big hospital room with Pepper, possibly for days? Holy shit.

"Pepper... am I still dreaming?"

She planted a firm kiss on his forehead. "Does that feel like you are, Mr. Stark?"

"Absolutely. And I don't want to wake up, ever."

  


* * *

  


Rhodey hated having to leave the scene in the middle of it, uncertain of whether Tony would live or die, and he hated having to leave Pepper there alone, mad with grief by the looks of it. He couldn't believe she had actually stripped off her protective clothing. He knew she was very dedicated to her job and cared a great deal about Tony, but that had been extreme even for her.

As much as he hated it, Rhodey had promised Sitwell that he'd stop by at the local S.H.I.E.L.D. office at 1600, so he had no choice but to go. Tony had made it clear that the investigation was important, probably more important than Tony's life, since many more lives could be at risk.

The local "office" was actually only one floor of a building otherwise occupied by other government agencies. There seemed to be only about ten people working there, with Sitwell the only one who was actually eager to get something done. Not that Rhodey wanted to criticize them too much, they were all doing their jobs well enough. The others just did it with less fervor and more coffee. The apparent small size of the office and the lack of staff didn't really mean anything, either. There was an extensive network of S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives all around the country, and they communicated with them real-time.

"Good news! Or, well, at least news, I'm not sure if they're that good, but anyway," Sitwell explained excitedly. "We've managed to track down several of the missing scientists, plus one more who was missing and Mr. Stark hadn't found out about. One of the Stark Industries researchers was found dead, still in Brazil. Looked a lot like a car crash, but we're working on the details, it may have been something else. Out of the other seven, we have proof that all of them have been to Brazil at some point, but four have now left the Americas completely. They were headed towards different parts of Asia, so we can't know exactly where they were going. Probably the same place. The whole operation was expertly arranged, they traveled under false identities and all that, but, of course, that couldn't keep us from finding out."

"Of course," Rhodey repeated. It wasn't exactly easy to keep track of Sitwell's rambling talk, when he felt so preoccupied, all his thoughts still in the hospital room with Tony. "Good job. So, to summarize, out of eight missing people, one's dead, four have fled the country and three are still unaccounted for?"

"Yes, and one of those three is the woman who used to work for Stark Industries. We have a few leads that suggest she might still be in Brazil, but no certain information. It's slow, working with the local authorities there. Still, I'm sure will have more on her soon."

"Great. I'm sure Mr. Stark will appreciate your work."

"How is Mr. Stark? Will he be joining us in the investigation soon?"

"I don't know," Rhodey replied, struggling to keep his emotions in check. "I think I should get going now."

"But you only just arrived, you haven't even seen the data yet!"

"There's time for that later," Rhodey said, walked out of the office and drove back to the hospital.

Rhodey had been away for some two hours, but when he returned to Tony's room, it was as if he had never left. Pepper sat in the exact same place, still holding Tony's hand, Tony was still unconscious, looked very ill and had the same amount of medical machinery around him. Doctor Taub was hovering about his bed, checking the monitors, and nodded to Rhodey as a greeting.

"Rhodey!" Pepper exclaimed, and that second Rhodey knew that unlike he'd first thought, things had changed. She was smiling.

"What's up?"

"Tony's better. He's getting better, he's going to be all right," she said, all the earlier anxiety swept away from her face.

Rhodey joined her again in keeping company to Tony. After over an hour of uneventful vigil, the wait was unexpectedly rewarded, as he woke up. He only stayed conscious for a minute or so, just long enough that Pepper and Rhodey got to say "hi" and tell him the good news of his condition. Of course, even during such a short time and restricted to communicating through words written in a barely legible hand, Tony also managed to toss in some geekish humor. As he fell asleep again and the clipboard and pen slipped from his hands, Rhodey picked them up and grinned fondly at the smiley Tony had drawn.

"Everything's going to be okay," he told Pepper.

"Yes, I think so, too."

"We still need to catch whoever's behind this, though. I've got news from S.H.I.E.L.D., they have a few leads."

"Well, that's fine, but please don't tell Tony yet, Rhodey," she pleaded. "If you do, he'll just leap up from that bed and rush head-first into the danger, and he's still far from healthy."

"Yeah, well, I guess I might keep the news to myself for a while longer. Especially seeing as he's asleep again," Rhodey winked. "By the way, it's almost bedtime for healthy people as well. I'm heading to the hotel soon. Now that I know Tony's recovering, I might actually manage to get some sleep. You should try, too," he noted, knowing well enough how little rest she had had last night.

"It's that late? I had no idea. I guess I'll have to ask someone to bring me a bed."

On his way to the hotel, Rhodey wondered about the change he thought he saw in Pepper's attitude towards Tony. It had been there all day, he realized, he just hadn't really stopped to consider it. Somehow, she was more at ease around him than before, and the way she'd touched him today was something Rhodey had never seen from her. Maybe it was just her being worried. Rhodey knew well how being close to death, or the death of someone close to you, could change people. Then again, Pepper staying in Tony's room, even through the night, when she probably could've gotten a room of her own if she'd only asked... Rhodey wondered what this was leading into.

  


* * *

  


Pepper just couldn't force herself to believe that she could be in any danger herself. That she might've caught the nanovirus and might end up as sick as Tony had been. The whole idea was so unreal now that Tony was healing that she just ignored it completely.

The doctors had told that Tony's latest blood sample showed less nanoviruses than before, but again, they emphasized that it might only mean that his immune system had won the fight regardless of what the EMP had or hadn't done. They had also taken blood from her, but so far nothing unusual had showed up - but they told her that it might not mean anything either, Tony had only started feeling sick days after he'd caught the bug, and they couldn't tell if it would show up in blood samples before that. The truth was, they lacked any accurate means to test for the nanovirus, since looking at someone's blood through a microscope really wasn't one.

So, here she was, stuck in the hospital too. By the evening, the doctors had done the paperwork, and she was officially admitted. For the night, when she asked, they brought her a bed of her own, and hideous hospital clothes. Of course, she had brought clothes with her, a nice satin nightgown, and her toothbrush, and her make-up, and everything, but now she couldn't remember where she'd left her luggage. Probably somewhere in the hospital hallway. She'd ask someone to fetch it for her tomorrow. Today, she was so tired that she was starting to nod off while sitting by Tony's side.

After she woke up with her forehead resting against his ribs with no recollection of falling asleep, she decided she could as well follow Rhodey's advice and lie down. She was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.

In the morning, everything was better. After Pepper had eaten the completely tasteless hospital breakfast, the doctors showed up, and Tony woke up, and they pulled out the breathing tube. Though he gave her a horrible scare and stopped breathing for a while, House brought him back with a few mocking words, and there he was, breathing on his own, finally!

Only when she had to explain to him what she had done, why she was here without protection, and he asked her if he was dreaming, and she kissed his brow, the full reality of the situation dawned on her. She was trapped in this room with him, for who knew how long. Oh God.

"So, Pepper, I was thinking... Since we're stuck here for a while," he started in his still breathless voice. She frowned at him, slightly worried about what was coming. "This room's dreary. Seriously need to do something about it. I want a proper TV... and a surround sound system... and a king-size bed."

  


* * *

  


"Doctor Dimwit," House shook his head at Stark's wisecrack. That was lame. Then again, Stark had almost died, maybe it wasn't a wonder he was a bit rusty. House was looking forward to him getting better. There was some stuff he wanted to talk about, and, of course, a lot of verbal sparring to do.

House and Kutner left Stark's room after the successful extubation, to find themselves surrounded by a group of men in suits - or more exactly, three men and one woman, who also wore a pantsuit and had short swept-back hair. They all looked bored but sinister, wearing suitable secret agent earpieces, and one of them even had sunglasses.

"Kutner, look out! The Men in Black are here. I told you Stark was an alien!" House quipped, not really put off by the situation. He'd been expecting visitors like this a lot sooner, actually.

The secret agent people showed no reaction to House's words. "Doctor House," one of them said, and offered him a clipboard with a very official-looking form on it. Kutner got one too. House eyed it through: a non-disclosure agreement. No surprise there, either. The only interesting question was who the people worked for.

"Special agent Newell, S.H.I.E.L.D.," the man who had given House the form introduced himself. "We're here to make sure that no word whatsoever of Stark's arc reactor or the nanovirus that attacked him will ever reach the public."

"But... we sent Mr. Stark's blood samples to the CDC earlier on, when we didn't know what this was," Kutner spoke up timidly.

"That has been taken care of already, Doctor Kutner. Should anyone ask them, they will assure them that Stark's blood tested positive for HPS."

"Shield?" House repeated, frowning. He'd never heard the acronym before. "Superhero-Helping Intelligence-Evading Lot of Dorks or something like that?"

Newell took House's taunting without the slightest change in his expression. "Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division," he answered, and showed House a badge with a logo depicting an eagle.

"Oh, all right, that really explains everything. Not," House scoffed. 

"Believe me, Doctor House, you don't want to get in trouble with us."

He looked at the form again. As far as he could tell, it seemed genuine. He signed it. "I wouldn't have spoken to anyone anyway," he told them. "There is this little thing called doctor-patient confidentiality, you know." What he didn't say aloud was, he might not have cared about getting in trouble with these secret agent men, but he definitely didn't want to get in trouble with Iron Man. Or, at least any more trouble than he already was in, to be exact.


	9. "I don't think you're healthy enough"

To Pepper's relief, Tony spent most of his first convalescent day alternating between periods of manic activity and, after he got too exhausted, sleep. If they'd both need to stay here for much longer, Pepper would be driven nuts by his hyperactivity. Hopefully, they would know soon enough whether the virus was finished and gone or not: at Tony's suggestion, they had sent his blood samples from both before the EMP and after it, and one from Pepper, to Brazil. Of course, Tony had had to spend an hour or so on the phone (through his helmet, of course), getting the biotech center back into action. After that, he had fallen asleep with the helmet on.

The doctors took advantage of the times he was asleep, and did most of their stuff then. It included, to Pepper's bewilderment, the removal of a catheter that'd traveled through his jugular vein into his heart.

"Was that a safe thing to put in there, with the shrapnel and all?" she asked Taub when they were done with the removal.

"Procedures like this are never entirely safe, and we needed the information to know how his heart was doing. By the way, Miss Potts, you really should talk to him about the surgery. It's just plain dumb not to have the shrapnel removed."

"I will, but I don't know... He needs the arc reactor to power up his suit, I doubt he'll ever really even consider getting rid of it."

"But he could just incorporate the reactor into the suit, couldn't he? There's no reason it has to be in him."

"Oh, well, I guess not, but still... Well, I'll talk to him."

She didn't get much of a chance to talk to him during that day, though. Tony spent most of his active spells buying stuff. Kutner proved to be very helpful, and he brought them little things like a mirror, a shaving kit and a completely ludicrous nightgown with lots of black lace, which she was absolutely never going to wear, and for which she longed to bitch-slap Tony, but couldn't force herself to when he still looked sick.

Tony even managed to talk Rhodey, who was busy enough working with S.H.I.E.L.D. and arranging a press conference with Cuddy to announce the good news, into getting him a complete home theater system. Though the colonel first declined adamantly, Tony didn't accept defeat. "But Rhodey, I thought you were my friend! I'm a sick man, you know, and with a heart condition and all," he pointed a thumb at the arc reactor. "I could drop dead any moment! You wouldn't want me to spend my last days in misery and boredom, would you?" he pleaded, on and on, until Rhodey shook his head in surrender and left to buy the stuff.

Pepper wasn't too sad, when Tony's plans to get a bed big enough for two ran into an obstacle named Lisa Cuddy, Dean of Medicine. She'd turned the furniture delivery guys away from the door, and called Stark, furious. "Mr. Stark, this is absolutely out of the question. This is a hospital! You can't just start acting like you own the place, no matter how much money you've got and no matter how much you pay us. I've already had other patients complain about the noise from your hi-fi sound system or whatever it is you've got there. No. You are in the hospital, and you will sleep in hospital beds." And no matter what Tony said, she wouldn't relent. Pepper could see that Cuddy had had plenty of practice in this sort of conversations - after all, she'd been dealing with House for years.

So, all in all, the first full day stuck in the room with Tony wasn't too bad. On the emotional level, she still couldn't decide what to feel and how to act around him, so mostly, she kept her distance. Actually, they were almost back to the semi-distant, teasing boss and assistant relationship they'd had before. To her surprise, he didn't push the matter, but gave her her time. They ended up spending most of the day watching movies (chosen by Tony, bought by Kutner), though Tony slept through most of them.

The second day, Tony woke up feeling so much better that keeping him stationary was near impossible. After they'd eaten breakfast and watched "I am Legend" ("It's not a nanovirus, but at least it's a virus - and Will Smith kind of reminds me of Rhodey," Tony had commented on this choice of movie), he announced that he wanted to fix the lamps above his bed. It hadn't been done yet, because, of course, they couldn't let an electrician into the room.

"Tony, you shouldn't, I don't think you're healthy enough," she told him.

"You're not my doctor."

"I don't think your doctors think you're healthy enough either, sir."

"My doctors are dimwits, and they're not here right now, as you can see," Tony motioned at the room around them. He reached to turn off the heart monitor, ripped off the blood pressure cuff from his arm and started stripping the electrodes off his chest.

"Mr. Stark! Stop! You shouldn't!" she cried out in vain.

"Look, if I stand up and these come off, whoever's keeping an eye on my readings will probably think I'm having a heart attack or something. If I turn it all off like that, they'll just think a doctor turned it off for some reason. They can't possibly guess I'd know how to do it myself. And I know where the electrodes go, I'll put them back right where they belong when I'm done," he explained, sounding very convincing. He unclipped the oxygen-monitoring thing from his finger, slipped the nasal cannula off his face and stood up on his bed, reaching for the ceiling. 

He was wavering. "Um, Miss Potts, could use a little help with my balance..."

Sighing at his stubbornness, knowing that saying "no" would do no good, she walked over to his bed and wrapped her arms around his legs, helping him to stay upright. It wasn't quite helpful enough, though.

He hadn't even managed to open the lamp he was trying to work on, when his knees started to fold. "Oh, damn," he cursed breathlessly, lost his balance completely, and collapsed back onto the bed. She did her best to keep his fall a soft and easy one, and in the end, they ended up sitting on the bed in an undignified tangle of arms and legs, her right side against his left, her arms around him, his right hand grasping her shoulder...

"I guess... it really was... a bad idea," he panted. She could feel his chest heaving and his pulse racing against her side, and she felt... She felt absolutely amazingly wonderful, holding him like this. Her arms full of a very real, living, breathing Tony Stark, who loved her, and whom she loved. In the spur of the moment, she kissed him on the lips - and found the coppery taste of blood.

He pulled back form her. "Bit my lip. Sorry," he wiped his mouth on the back of his left hand. She noticed that his hand was bleeding too, since the IV had been torn out when he fell. It didn't look that bad, though. He would most certainly live.

"Never mind," she said, not wanting to lose the moment, and kissed him again. This time, he was completely into it as well.

He had slipped his right hand inside her hospital gown, running his fingers along her spine, when, with a hiss loud enough to startle them, the door opened.

  


* * *

  


Thirteen stopped in horror, almost dropped the file she was holding, and felt her face turn red with the embarrassment of the situation.

"I'm sorry," she muttered at Stark and Potts, who were currently wrapped around each other in a rather acrobatic-looking knot, and glued together at the lips. She turned around to walk away.

"Wait, was it something important?" Stark called after him, sounding perfectly guileless.

One could say that, Thirteen thought. Still facing the door, she answered, "News from Brazil."

"Okay, let's hear it," he said.

That left Thirteen no choice but to turn around again and stay in the room. To her relief, Stark and Potts had already untangled themselves. Potts stood up quickly, her face flushed, holding her gown closed with her hands, and scuttled to her own bed.

Now that she had a good look at Stark, Thirteen shook her head and couldn't decide whether to grin or to grimace. He had stripped off the monitoring they'd had on him, and the IV site in his hand was bleeding. Still, he wore such a perfect "puppy dog, caught in the act, but acting innocent" -look that Thirteen couldn't help but smile.

"It was an accident," he told her in a perfectly careless tone, as she started reattaching everything. "I can do that myself, just tell the news, all right?"

"No you can't, and I'm not telling anything before I've got everything in order again, Mr. Stark. You really should avoid 'accidents' like this in the near future," she told him sternly, feeling like a nagging old lady, so she had to add, "Personally, I don't care if you have sex in your hospital room, but as you can see," she pointed at the newly connected monitors, "you weren't getting enough oxygen and your heart rate was skyrocketing. I'm just concerned for your health."

"Fine, fine, whatever," Stark answered, his voice making it perfectly clear that he couldn't care less about what she'd said. "So, the news?"

"Yes. We've been in contact with your nanotechnology specialists in Brazil, and they've assured us that the EMP completely neutralized the nanovirus. The viruses we saw in your later blood samples were inactive. So, even though the virus is highly contagious when active, it seems extremely unlikely that Miss Potts could have caught it after the EMP was launched."

"I don't need to stay here any longer?" Miss Potts asked, managing to sound both relieved and disappointed at the same time.

"There's no medical reason for that," she answered.

"Yes, there is," Stark declared. "I'm her arc reactor."

  


* * *

  


"You're not going to leave, are you?" Tony asked Pepper as soon as Thirteen had left the room, giving her his most desperately pleading look.

"Well, sir, if you insist that I stay, what choice do I have?" she smirked.

"Pepper, you know I wouldn't force you to stick around if you hated doing it," he told her seriously.

"Tony," she shook her head at him. "Where else would I want to be?"

He smiled happily at her, and wanted to kiss her again, but she was sitting on her own bed, so he couldn't reach her. He could still taste her lips against his, mingled with the taste of his own blood. As kisses went, it had been very clumsy, but very, very intensive. Probably the best kiss he had every had. As stupid as it had been to try and fix the lamp, he definitely didn't regret it. It had broken the ice between them, the awkwardness that he'd known to expect after his not-quite-deathbed confession of love to her.

Unfortunately, the rest of the day contained considerably less kissing and much more business. Rhodey showed up, and finally gave Tony some news about the investigations. Out of eight missing scientists, S.H.I.E.L.D. had now found two dead, one of them in an apparently set-up car crash, the other with a drug overdose without any known history of addiction. Four had left the country using fake identities but commercial flights, which Tony thought surprising at first. After some more thought to the matter, he decided that it was actually a move that fit the rest of the case. Whoever his enemies were, they worked in the shadows, and probably weren't very rich. It didn't look like a massively big operation, but one run by a few expert agents. Whose agents, he still had no idea, and neither did S.H.I.E.L.D.

Two of the scientists involved in the business might still be alive somewhere, including one Doctor Emmy Jordan of Stark Industries biotech. Unfortunately, they still had nothing conclusive on them, just the strong suspicion that one or both were still somewhere in Brazil.

"I need to get over there and get to work," Tony told Pepper and Rhodey. "Iron Man just has to do something about this."

"Not yet," Pepper said firmly. "Not until the doctors say it's all right."

"But House will keep me here for months just out of sheer spite and meanness!"

"He won't, he wouldn't stand having you here for months," Rhodey remarked. "And Pepper's right, you should give it a few more days. Maybe S.H.I.E.L.D. will have located the scientists by then."

"And when you do go, I'll be coming with you," Pepper stated.

"Out of the question, Miss Potts! It could turn out to be dangerous, and..."

"No, Mr. Stark. I am coming, period," she interrupted him. "You might've been too sick to understand when I said it earlier, but I don't want to be over-protected. I want to help you whenever I can. There's bound to be a lot of organizational work to do at the biotech complex, with those missing workers and all, not to mention arranging your schedules. You need me there."

"You sure you don't mean to say that you need me, Miss Potts?" Tony winked. 

He noticed how Rhodey raised his eyebrows at them, but didn't say anything, and left the room soon.

Thanks to that annoying hag Cuddy, Tony never managed to get a bigger bed, but the hospital one was pretty wide, and Pepper was really slim. So, they watched the last movie for the night - Romeo + Juliet, chosen by her, for a change - snuggled close to each other on his bed. He fell asleep halfway through it, bone-tired after the active day, with Pepper's arm behind his neck and her cheek against his.

  


* * *

  


"Can I have those when you leave?" House asked, glancing at the impressive HDTV-screen and the high-end surround sound system Stark had acquired to his hospital room.

"You? I'd rather give them to Cuddy," Stark stunted his hopes. Not that House had really expected anything else, either.

It was the morning of Stark's sixth day at Princeton-Plainsboro, the fourth day since they'd hit the disease with the EMP, and he had been improving steadily. House had just finished his final check and given his OK that Stark could leave the hospital to continue convalescing at home. Miss Potts had already left the state to arrange things for Stark's return in his Malibu mansion - which meant that House finally had a moment with Stark without her in the room and casting lovey glances at her boss.

"I've been meaning to talk to you about the suit," House started, in a civil enough tone. "Who designed the medical scanners you've got in it?"

"I did."

"And are you a doctor?"

"No, but I've got an AI who's got access to enough medical data that he could have a dozen doctoral degrees."

"That's not the same. Really, you could use some help with those. I mean, why did you even pick the set of things that you had monitored? EKG I can understand, what with the mess you have in your chest, but EEG and body temperature? And respiratory rate - that's hardly an accurate diagnostic tool for anything."

"Oh, House, you disappoint me!" Stark shook his head. "It all makes perfect sense if you think about it at all. EEG's so that if I pass out, Jarvis knows to turn on the autopilot. Body temperature is directly linked to the suit's temperature regulation, and respiratory rate to the inbuilt respirator system."

"Apparently it wasn't working too well, since you almost suffocated in that suit when your lungs started failing."

"The only reason it's not working is that it's not nearly finished yet," Stark was on the defensive. "As you've seen, what I build always works, and my math is never wrong."

House had to give him that, considering how he'd managed to build the EMP device even though he'd been very sick. Not that House would let Stark know that was what he thought, though. "If you were that good, you wouldn't need to keep coming up with excuses for why your stuff doesn't work. And as it is, I'm actually trying to offer you a helping hand here. You could use a medical advisor, and I'm already in on all your secrets."

"You as my medical advisor?" Stark said incredulously. "Seriously, why would I pick you, when I could take anyone from your team, and Thirteen is both nicer and prettier than you?"

"You don't want her, she's a lesbian."

"No, she isn't," Stark said, completely confident. "Bisexual, at most. Haven't you seen the way she looks at me?"

"Like you're something the cat brought in?"

"No, that's the way she looks at you."

"Just because your stench is contagious."

Stark stayed silent for a beat longer after that line, staring at House with a look even more amused and mischievous than before, and then said, "Hey, Greg, are you seeing anyone? I think we'd make a great couple."

House couldn't help it. He smirked too.


	10. "And I want some answers"

"We've finished the full analysis of the nanovirus, Miss Potts. Sorry it took this long, but the people most qualified for this aren't here anymore," Laura Rivera, formerly research assistant, now junior researcher, explained apologetically.

"Don't worry too much about it, Miss Rivera," she smiled encouragingly. "We're not in a hurry. What have you got?"

"Lots of interesting details," the young researcher indicated the computer on the desk near them, so they sat down in front of it. She opened an image of the nanovirus on the screen. "We managed to take it apart entirely, and recognize the different components. The biological component," she clicked open another file, which showed a black and white picture with sets of horizontal lines, which said nothing to Pepper, "that is, the DNA we could find, which is analyzed here, mostly comes from a strain of hantavirus that is found in Brazil."

"So, whoever made this could've found it right here, just like that?"

"Yes, and that's probably why they picked it. Now, the technological part was mostly beyond our comprehension, but we could point out the electronanotechnological component which made the whole virus susceptible to EMPs. It's exactly the design we were going to use here, invented by Doctor Santos himself."

"Which really makes me wonder who's side he was on," Pepper said thoughtfully. "Anything else?"

"We also studied how the virus functions, and found out that it's transmissible from person to person, extremely contagious, but quite shortlived when it's airborne. So, if you happen to stand right next to someone who has it, you will get it too. If you stand on the other side of the room, then you probably won't - and if you come back an hour later, it's all gone. Which kind of makes sense if you want to use it as a weapon, I guess."

"I don't know anything about that sort of stuff."

"Me neither," Rivera admitted. "You know, what little I do know about biological warfare says that this nanovirus is a weird thing. I can't understand why they created it to begin with. There are plenty of disease they could've used without all this trouble and work they've put into this thing."

Pepper nodded. "Anything else?"

"Lots of stuff, but it's all in the files," she pointed at the computer.

"And I probably won't understand half of it anyway... Well, thank you very much, Miss Rivera," Pepper reached out a hand to shake Rivera's. "I'll see to it that Mr. Stark gets this information as well. Good work."

Pepper left the room feeling more than a bit strange. The way Rivera looked up to her and did her best to please her was something she was not used to. She should get used to it, now. At the moment, Pepper was basically Tony's stand-in here at the biotech complex, while Tony was away hunting the bad guys as Iron Man. She wasn't used to being in charge like this. On the other hand, she found it surprisingly easy. As it was, most of the scientists here were a lot easier to deal with than Tony.

Pepper walked across the shiny new corridors of the complex towards Tony's office - or rather, her office at the moment. The complex was airy and full of light, with lots of windows everywhere, but with enough air conditioning to keep it cool despite of all the bright sunlight. A nice place, and a perfect symbol for the new direction Stark Industries had taken, moving away from weapons technology. She entered the office and sat down behind the desk.

"Jarvis? How's Tony?"

"Mr. Stark, or Iron Man, I should say, has just crossed the border between Brazil and Colombia. Vital signs are within normal parameters, as specified by Doctor House, and the arc reactor is working optimally," the AI answered, and the corresponding data blinked on the screen in front of her.

"Worrying for me, Miss Potts?" Tony's voice came through the speakers, relayed by Jarvis.

"Who, me? In your dreams, Mr. Stark. I'm just checking in on you because I've got news for you," she said, and had Jarvis transmit the new data on the nanovirus to him.

"Good, thanks. And don't worry, mum, I'll be back home for dinner. I'm approaching target now. Iron Man out."

"Shall I inform you of any changes, mother?" Jarvis asked her in his perfectly emotionless voice.

"You're just as bad as he is!" she told the AI, trying to sound angry, but grinning nevertheless. "And no, he's a big boy, he can take care of himself. I'm not going to waste the whole day sitting here and worrying. Just let me know if there's a real emergency."

She opened the nanovirus data on the screen, but found her thoughts straying to other matters all the time. To Tony. After the few intense, passionate moments in the strange setting of forced cohabitation in the hospital room, she had taken a time out. He had tried to continue like they had started, but she had pushed him away gently, and he had gotten the message quickly enough.

It was five days since they'd left the hospital, and things were "back to normal", again, sort of. He kept flirting at her, she kept returning his flirt with wit and nothing more than that. They slept in separate rooms, she was his assistant, he was her boss - with the slight change that, after she had given him several angry lectures on the subject, he was less overprotective and let her in on all his Iron Man stuff. At times, they touched, they had even ended up kissing a few times, but it wasn't the same, when she felt so uncertain.

She couldn't decide where to go from here. Even though he had changed, even though ever since Afghanistan he had been slightly more responsible than before and no longer carried a new girl to his bed every night, she knew a relationship with him was a bad idea. Iron Man's girlfriend? That was a crazy position to put herself in. He was always in danger, whether it was a nanovirus, an enemy trying to beat the living daylights out of him, or something even stranger, like a former friend wrenching out his arc reactor. Of course, being near to him would also be dangerous to her, it would make her an easy target that his enemies could use to get to him. There were lots of downsides. Then again, he was one of a kind, he was brilliant, and how likely was it that she should ever run across a man like him and find mutual feelings?

So, did she love him? Yes. Was it wise? Absolutely not. What should she do? She had no idea.

  


* * *

  


"So, how was the neurology conference?" Taub asked Foreman, as the four doctors sat in House's office, waiting for him to show up. 

A new day at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, Kutner thought, and a new difficult case waiting for the Diagnostics Department. Back to business, as usual.

"It was great, felt like a vacation. Several interesting lectures, a good party, lots of old colleagues to meet," Foreman described. "And no House."

"So, you don't regret it at all that you didn't get to treat Iron Man?" Kutner said. He, for one, would have. It had been the most exciting case he had ever worked on, no doubt about it.

"Dealing with both Stark and House at the same time?" Foreman shook his head. "My head would've exploded."

"Stark really wasn't that bad," Kutner declared defensively.

"Oh yes, he was!" Thirteen exclaimed. "Every bit as bad as House, or worse."

"Just because you walked in on him and his assistant..." Kutner started, without thinking what he was saying.

"Hey, who told you about that? I never told anyone!"

"Apparently, somehow, House found out about it from Stark, and then told pretty much everyone," Taub explained, looking amused at Thirteen's horror.

"See? That was my point. Those two in one place at the same time," Foreman was shaking his head again. "Not good for your sanity."

"So, you probably haven't heard the rumors yet?" Kutner asked him. "That House is going to be Stark's medical advisor or something like that?"

"Oh, come on, it makes no sense. They couldn't stand each other," Thirteen said disbelievingly.

"House probably started those rumors himself," Taub added.

"Well, even if he did, why would he lie about it?" Kutner insisted.

"You're right, actually," Foreman agreed. "House doesn't care what other people think about him. He wouldn't start a rumor to make himself appear cool. He would definitely start a rumor just to addle our minds, though. If it's true, he's probably going to have to keep it low profile anyway, or Iron Man's enemies will try to get information from him... So, I guess we'll never know for sure."

  


* * *

  


Even though Tony was only some five hundred feet away from his target, he still couldn't see it. Without the exact coordinates and GPS and Jarvis to guide him, he would never have found the place. It was a tiny biological research outpost, deep in the Colombian part of the Amazon rainforest. It would take several days to reach it on foot from any larger settlement, there were no roads, and not enough space to land a helicopter. For Iron Man, it was naturally no problem at all.

Five days after House had cut him loose from Princeton-Plainsboro, Tony was still technically a convalescent, but he wouldn't let that slow him down. He didn't feel sick anymore, the only residual effect from the nanovirus was that he got tired faster than normally. He was clearly somewhat out of shape, and would be for days, maybe weeks, but that didn't matter when he had the suit on. In his armor, he was as formidable as always, faster and stronger than any ordinary man. As long as he stayed in the suit and kept his days short enough that he wouldn't get too exhausted, he was fine.

Tony had already checked two places today, one of which had been a false lead, the other, a cold one - the target had been there, but had left days ago. This would be the last one for today. It was also the most promising one. The biological station was funded by the same university where Doctor Jordan, the missing SI researcher had studied, and it was so small, so remote and unimportant that it had taken even S.H.I.E.L.D. days to learn about it.

Iron Man landed with a flourish, punching the ground in front of the derelict hut that was the only building of the station. He looked around, but couldn't spot anyone instantly. There were only two people working here, a married couple, who spent most of their days roaming the rainforest, so it was no wonder the place seemed abandoned. He switched to the suit scanners, which were much more accurate than the naked eye, and walked a circle around the hut, scanning the surrounding forest. There! He caught sight of someone running away from the hut.

He ran after them, the thick plant growth slowing him down, and making it impossible for him to take off and fly after the fugitive. His suit was clumsy in such a setting, and his target was moving faster than him. He was already starting to feel the extra stress on his body. He stopped. A change of tactics was in order. Aiming carefully, he shot several blasts into the canopy ahead and around of his prey, and then leaped forward with a measured burst from his boot jets, rushing through branches and leaves and vines.

Iron Man reached his target, who had stopped, cowering against a thick tree trunk. She was an early middle-age woman, wearing khaki shorts and a black T-shirt, her dark hair cut so short that she was almost bald, forming a strange contrast to the feminine eyeglasses she wore. "Facial recognition confirmed: Doctor Emmy Jordan, senior researcher, Stark Industries biotech, current status: missing," Jarvis told Tony.

"It's all right, Doctor Jordan," Tony said to her. "I'm not going to hurt you."

Jordan relaxed somewhat, lowering her hands, which she had been holding protectively in front of herself, and sat on the ground, her back against the tree. Then she took a good look at her pursuer, and her hands flew up again, in a fist covering her mouth. After a while she uttered, "Iron Man? Tony Stark? But it can't be! You can't be alive, you can't have survived it!"

"The one and only. Sorry to disappoint you," Tony said, stepping closer to her, knowing full well how menacing he was in the suit. "And I want some answers."

"Please, just leave me alone! They'll find me, and they'll kill me, like they did the others, like they did Brian!"

Jarvis spoke up without asking at the mention of the name: "Doctor Brian McPherson, senior researcher, Stark Industries biotech, current status: deceased," and the data on McPherson appeared on the HUD. Tony muttered a "yes" to the AI. He had figured as much already. Doctor McPherson had been the other missing SI scientist, supposedly a friend or a love interest of Doctor Jordan, and he had been found dead in a staged car crash.

"You're safe enough with me as long as you cooperate. If you don't, well, then you might be happier with 'them', whoever 'they' are. Which is one of the most important questions I want answered," he told her. Of course he was just bluffing, of course he wouldn't hurt her. She was possibly a key witness, and no matter what she had done, they needed her safe and sound enough to tell everything she knew.

"I don't know, I don't, I really don't," she shook her head, still panicky. "They approached Brian first, just a job offer, something extra that he could work on while still employed by Stark Industries. He didn't care about the money, he went in for the chance to work on something practical right away, unlike at SI where we were just doing theoretical stuff and running simulations. Brian asked me to join in too, because they could use my skills, and I went in mostly for the money - they promised to pay a lot, ridiculously, really - you know, Stark Industries pays us well enough, you do, but that was much more. I liked Brian and I trusted him and I thought, what the hey, easy money, so I joined in."

"You didn't answer the question. I'm not here to blame you for anything right now, Doctor Jordan, you don't need to explain your actions. Just tell me who hired you."

"It was weird, really. When we joined in, they said it was a company, they even had official forms and all. It was called Decatech. But it wasn't a real company, it was a coverup for something else. There was this one guy we saw once or twice who was running the whole operation, a bald guy who had this ring which sort of stood out because it didn't fit in, a guy like him wearing a ring like that."

Tony felt his jaw drop and was glad he was wearing the suit so his stupefied expression wouldn't show. A bald guy with a ring? His mind was flashing with vision of Afghanistan once again, of the villainous man called Raza who had been leading it all. "Can you describe him more closely?"

"I just saw him a few times... He looked Chinese, I think, he was pretty short and had a round face, he was called something like Liu, I think."

Tony frowned, perplexed. Could it be that it wasn't Raza, after all? "Chinese, not, say, Arab, by any chance? You absolutely sure?"

"Definitely not Arab. Why would you think that?" Jordan shook her head. "And I heard from some of the other researchers who they had hired that we were actually working for someone called 'The Ten Rings', who may have been a terrorist organization, or something, but that was more like a rumor, though, of course, by the time I heard that, we were already sure that we shouldn't have joined them and that we were working on something bad, but we couldn't help it, because those who didn't follow and tried to go to the authorities got killed," she rambled on.

"Damn!" Tony cursed, turning away from her for a while, walking around in a small circle, frustrated. The Ten Rings. The same group that had captured him in Afghanistan. Who the hell where they, and what were they doing here? They were clearly after him again, even though Obie was out of the picture already. They'd attacked Stark Industries and they'd attacked him, and now they had probably fled the scene again. "Can you tell me where you worked?" Tony asked Jordan, not really hoping to get an exact answer.

Sure enough, she shook her head. "No, we were taken there with jeeps through the jungle, it was a remote place, impossible to locate. Santos almost did it, he was following us and had a GPS, but they noticed him and caught him and forced him to work for them too."

"Santos is dead now," Tony told her gloomily. "He shot himself. I still don't know why. Was he loyal to the company or wasn't he?"

"He shot himself? Well, he was going to die anyway, he had no chance," Jordan muttered. "He was loyal. They caught him and held him at gunpoint and said that he could either work for them or die, so he said he'd work for them, but while working, he installed a failsafe in the nanovirus we were working on - and tried to send messages out to let you know about the operation - and they caught him again, and this time, they said he would die, and he would suffer, because he had betrayed them, so they sent him to go to SI biotech to infect you."

"Loyal to the end... Without the failsafe, I'd be dead now. Santos was one of the heroes of the story, then," he said, mostly to himself. Now, he finally had a good theory for why Santos had killed himself. He had had the nanovirus, and he had been sure he would die anyway, that the nanovirus would spread and kill countless people. Santos had known he had failed to stop the bad guys, and that it looked like he had been working for them. He had been desperate. He had killed himself to escape it all. It sounded credible, but since Santos was dead, Tony would never hear the whole truth from him. "What about you, then, and the others? Where did your loyalties lie?"

"I was just loyal to Brian," she shook her head. "Of course, it was clear from the start that we were working on biological warfare, and it didn't put me off. But honestly, we didn't know it was going to be used like that, so soon, and on you - we never would've done a thing if we had known, and when we learned about it, it was too late and they would've killed us if we hadn't finished it. And it was really just an etude, an exercise - the hantavirus-based nanovirus, the one they tried to infect you with. They wanted more, they wanted even more lethal stuff, and a few people actually agreed to do it. Brian and I, we weren't going to, so, the day Santos had been sent out, before they realized what we were planning to do, we escaped. I've been on the run ever since. They found us once - the car crash - but I survived it, and I kept running, and I'm still running, because if I stop, they'll kill me..." Jordan was speaking in a continuous flood now, her eyes wide, tears running down her face.

Tony had heard enough. Though he was boiling with anger and frustration at the damn terrorists that had fled him once again and who had used people like this and killed them off just like that, he forced his voice to stay casual and told her, "Hey, it's all right. You're safe now, I promise. Stark Industries looks after its own. Everything's going to be all right. Let's get out of this jungle now, before my suit starts to rust in all this humidity."

He grabbed her in his gold-titanium-clad arms and took off, heading back to base.

Soaring through the air carrying this rescued lady, casually flirting with her just because he couldn't help it and because he hoped it would make her feel more at ease, Tony found his thoughts straying to Pepper. She would be waiting for him back at the biotech complex, wearing a look of well-covered worry, but worry nevertheless. Maybe he would kiss her as a greeting, and maybe, just maybe, today would be the day when she would kiss him back and not flinch away. He didn't know what he had done wrong, why she was acting so distant and reserved again. For all his experience with girls, he couldn't figure her out, because she was different from the others - that was the very reason why he loved her so much, but it made things complicated, too. He already missed the moments they'd had in the hospital. Hell, it had almost been worth suffering the nanovirus just to share those moments with her.

Maybe today would be the day, and if not today, maybe tomorrow. He wasn't a very patient man - actually, he was the very opposite of patient - but he would be patient for her. He knew she loved him, and she knew he loved her, and that was enough, for now.

  


* * *

  


House unlocked the door and limped in to his apartment. It was the evening after yet another pointless and dull day at the Princeton-Plainsboro Department of Diagnostics. The patient of the day had been a very boring guy with Churg-Strauss syndrome, and the only bright side of the day had been a confrontation with Cuddy about the home theater system Stark had left behind. House was so going to have it.

Crouching awkwardly, he picked up the mail. Several bills, the latest issue of the Journal of Renal Medicine, and, well well! A thick letter-size envelope with the Stark Industries logo on it. Suddenly feeling like a kid at Christmas, he tore it open right away.

There was a bunch of official-looking papers and a few forms - the contract for his consulting job as Stark's medical advisor. Among the stack of papers, there was something that didn't quite belong. It was a picture, a large photo of Iron Man soaring among the white clouds in an azure sky, sunlight reflected from his red and gold armor in a lens flare. Written in a corner of the picture in a golden marker was an inscription:
    
    
    To Superdoc & Sidekicks,
    Thanks,
    Tony Stark

House stared at the signature. "Thanks?" That was all Stark had come up with? Had he even written this himself, or had he just had some PR guy write it for him? Feeling more than a bit disappointed, House flipped over the picture, and there, on the blank other side, were two more lines of text.
    
    
    P.S. I'll call you about that date.
    P.P.S. You were wrong and I was right.

House grinned. That was more like it.

Sure, House had been wrong about a lot of things on this case. He had been wrong about the diagnosis, not once, but twice, which he was greatly annoyed about - though the second time he couldn't have helped it, because the nanovirus had been something he couldn't possibly have expected, and it really had been almost identical to HPS. More importantly, he had been wrong about Stark on many accounts. Sure, the man was a jerk, but he wasn't quite as selfish as House had thought, and he really was as smart as the media claimed, maybe even smarter. House still wasn't prepared to admit that Stark was a hero, let alone a superhero, but he could admit that Stark might be one. For someone as cynical as House, just the idea that there actually might be such a thing as a superhero, who might possibly be even half as heroical as they were supposed to, was something really special and extremely cool.

This once, House was more glad than ever that he had been wrong.


End file.
